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HEART OF EUROPE 




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HEART OF EUROPE 



BY 

RALPH ADAMS gRAM, Litt.D., LL.D. 

F.A.I.A., A.N.A., F.R.G.S. 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1915 



2 



^ 



0* 



COPYBIGHT, 1915, BT 

CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS 



Published October, 1915 




NOV -5 1915 



CI.A414404 



TO 
E. S. C. 



WHO SOME DAY MAT KNOW THE 

HEART OP EUROPE 

AND TO WHOM THIS BOOK MAY BE A DIM RECALLING 

"OP OLD, UNHAPPY, PAR-OFP THINGS 
AND BATTLES LONG AGO" 

WHITEHALL 
29 AUGUST, 1915 



The author wishes to express his great sense 
of personal obligation to Miss Gertrude Schirmer 
and Mr. Emil P. Albrecht for their kindness in 
furnishing illustrations that otherwise could not 
have been obtained. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Sanctuary Laid Waste 1 

II. The Forging of Medievalism 15 

HI. Flanders and Brabant 37 

IV. The Spanish Netherlands 63 

V. The Glory of a Great Art . . . . . 84 

VI. Amiens and Reims . 109 

VII. The Burghers and Their Building . . . 128 

VIII. Coal and Iron 149 

IX. A Tale of Three Cities 172 

X. Margaret of Malines . . 191 

XI. The Fifteenth-Century Painters . . . 219 

XII. Gothic Sculpture 238 

XIII. The Allied Arts 256 

XIV. Art in the Rhineland 278 

XV. The Forest of Arden 296 

XVI. Ex Tenebris Lux 310 

ix 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Reims Frontispiece ^ 

Facing page 

The hall of the University of Louvain 12 ^ 

The chapel at Aix 30 r 

St. Bavon's Tower, Ghent 44 v/ 

The Quai aux Heroes, Ghent 50 ^ 

Bruges, from the Quai du Rosaire 54 

The Duke of Alva, Moro van Dashorst 68 

Jumieges 86 ' 

Laon 98 v ' 

Beauvais 106 " 

Amiens 112' 

Reims 116" 

The destroyed Hotel de Ville of Arras 130' 

The destroyed Cloth Hall of Ypres 132 * 

Bruges, Hotel de Ville 134 * 

The Hotel de Ville of Louvain 138 ^ 

A chimney-piece from Courtrai 164 

A canal in Malines 174 

The belfry of Bruges 184 

xi 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing page / 

The tower of St. Rombaut, Malines 202 

A detail from the church at Brou 216 v 

Our Lady, from the Tryptich at Ghent, Hubert van Eyck . . . 226 v 

A drawing of St. Barbara, Jan van Eyck 232 v 

A Memling altar-piece 234 ^ 

Madonna and Child with St. Luke, Van der Weyden .... 236 ' 

A head, now destroyed, from Reims 242 

Three destroyed figures from Reims 250 v 

Fifteenth-century Flemish tapestry 262 

Worms 282 

Cologne 286 I 

Strasbourg 288 

Bacharach on the Rhine 292 

Schloss Eltz 300 v 



HEART OF EUROPE 



HEART OF EUROPE 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 

BETWEEN the Seine and the Rhine lay once 
a beautiful land wherein more history was 
made, and recorded in old monuments full of 
grace and grandeur and fancy, than in almost 
any other region of the world. The old names 
were best, for each aroused memory and begot 
strange dreams: Flanders, Brabant, the Pala- 
tinate; Picardy, Valois, Champagne, Franche- 
Comte; Artois, Burgundy, and Bar. And the 
town names ring with the same sonorous melody, 
evoking the ghosts of a great and indelible past: 
Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, and Liege; Aix-la- 
Chapelle, Coblentz, and Treves; Ypres and Lille, 
Tournai and Fontenay, Arras and Malplaquet; 
Laon, Nancy, Verdun, and Varennes; Amiens, 
Soissons, and Reims. Caesar, Charlemagne, St. 
Louis, Napoleon, with proconsuls, paladins, cru- 
saders, and marshals unnumbered; kings, prince- 
bishops, monks, knights, and aureoled saints take 



2 HEART OF EUROPE 

form and shape again at the clang of the splen- 
did names. 

And in all these places, and by all these men 
(and elsewhere, endlessly, and by hands un- 
numbered), two thousand years had wrought 
their visible manifestation in abbey, church, and 
cathedral; in manor and palace and castle, in 
trade hall and civic hall, and in library and semi- 
nary and school. 

Wars, great and small, have swept it from 
river to river, but much has been free for a cen- 
tury and all of it free for forty years. Under 
every oppression and every adversity it has 
thriven and grown rich, not in material things 
alone, but in those commodities that have ac- 
tual intrinsic value; and a short year ago it was 
the most prosperous, peaceful, and industrious 
quarter of Europe. Whatever the war, however 
violent the opposing agencies, its priceless rec- 
ords of architecture and other arts were piously 
or craftily spared, except when the madness of 
the French Revolution swept over its convents 
and cloisters, leaving Coxyde, Villers, St. Bavon, 
St. Jean des Vignes, the Abbaye des Lys, dead 
witnesses of the faith that had built them and 
the spared monuments as well. 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 3 

And now a thing calling itself the highest 
civilisation in Europe, with the name of God in 
its mouth, again sweeps the already well-swept 
land. In defiance of Peace Palaces and Con- 
ferences; in spite of the bankers of the world 
and their double-knotted purse-strings; in spite 
of a socialism that said war should not happen 
again, and an evolutionary philosophy that said 
it could not happen again (men now being so 
civilised), the world is at war, and the old arena 
of Europe flames as at Armageddon, while those 
things too sacred for pillage and destruction by 
the armies and the commanders of five centuries 
are given over to annihilation in order that the 
peril of the Slav, on the other side of Europe, may 
not menace the treasured civilisation of the West, 
whose vestiges even now are blazing pyres, or 
cinders and ashes ! 

It is significant that thus far the heavy hand 
of the pursuer has fallen notably on two things: 
the school and the church; for these are two of 
the three things he most fears and hates. Not 
the school, as with him, where secularism, through 
economic materialism and a sinister philosophy, 
breeds a race as unprincipled as it is efficient and 
fearless, nor the church, as with him, where in- 



4 HEART OF EUROPE 

tellectualism ousts faith, expediency morals, and 
God is glad "ably to support" the victorious 
battalions of a crown prince. Quite otherwise; 
the school that teaches both independence and 
regard for law, with religion as the only basis for 
right conduct, and the Church that teaches humil- 
ity and the reality of sin, and the subservience of 
all rulers, whether king or parliament, to the 
religion and the authority of a living Christ 
speaking to-day as He spoke on the Mount of 
Olives. 

When the University of Louvain passed in the 
smoke and flame of a murdered city; when the 
Church of St. Pierre and the Cathedral of Malines 
and the Shrine of Our Lady of Reims were shat- 
tered by bombs and swept by devouring fire, 
there was something in it all other than the grim 
necessity of a savage war; there was the symbol 
of a new thing in the world, built on all Louvain, 
Malines, and Reims had denied, and destroying 
the very outward show of what could not exist on 
earth side by side with its potent and dominant 
negation. 

Reims Cathedral "stood in the line of gun- 
fire," it was "a landmark and unfortunately 
could not escape," it had been "fortified by the 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 5 

enemy and therefore could not be spared." All 
true, each statement, and thus: It stood between 
a brute power founded on Bismarckian force and 
Nietzschean antichristian philosophy, on the one 
hand, and on the other nations newly conscious 
of their Christianity, ashamed of their backslid- 
ing, and ready to fight to the death for what had 
made them. It was a landmark, a vast, visible 
showing forth of a great Christian spirit and a 
greater Christian principle, and as such it must 
go down. It was fortified, as every church is 
fortified, to fight against the devil and all his 
works, and therefore, equally with the allied 
forces behind it, it was fighting against a common 
enemy. If by its ruin it can make this universally 
and eternally clear, we can see it go without a 
tear or a regret, for, like the martyr in the Roman 
arena, it has accomplished its work. 

Thus far, of the great cities, Liege, Louvain, 
Malines, Ypres, Arras, and Reims are gone, with 
the greater part of their treasured art, while Laon, 
Soissons, and Namur have been grievously 
wrecked. Apparently, Amiens, Noyon, Bruges, 
and Ghent are now safe, but endless opportuni- 
ties open for destruction and pillage, and we may 
well be prepared for irreparable loss before the 



6 HEART OF EUROPE 

invader is hurled back across his natural river 
frontier. Let us consider, not what already has 
been annihilated, but the kind of art it was, so 
measuring, in a degree, the quality of our loss — 
and of what we still may lose. 

First of all, there are the towns themselves, 
for all art is not concentrated in hotel de ville 
and cathedral; it shows itself sometimes in more 
appealing guise in the river villages and proud 
cities, and its testimony to a great past is here 
equally potent. Ypres, Malines, Dinant, Ter- 
monde, and Huy, all of which are gone, were 
treasures that belonged to all the world; Namur 
and Plombieres we could not spare, and as for 
Bruges and Ghent, even apart from their ex- 
quisite architecture and their treasures of paint- 
ing, the soul shudders at what might happen 
there were they involved in the retreat of a dis- 
organised army, when one considers what hap- 
pened to Liege and Louvain in its victorious ad- 
vance. All Belgium and Luxembourg, all Picardy 
and Champagne are, or were, rich with lovely 
little towns and villages, each a work of art in 
itself; they are shrivelling like a garden under 
the first frost, and, it may be, in a little while 
none will remain. 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 7 

The major architecture of this unhappy land 
falls into three classes and three periods of time. 
Oldest and most priceless are the churches, and 
these are of the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 
teenth centuries, the ages when religion was one 
and secure and was building a great civilisation 
that we would fain see equalled again. Then 
come the town halls and guildhalls of the fifteenth 
century, each speaking for the proud freedom of 
merchant and burgher, when the hold of religion 
was weakening a little, and the first signs were 
showing themselves of what, in the end, was to 
have issue in this war of wars; finally come the 
town houses of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, in all their quaint individuality and 
their overriding self-esteem, though fine still, and 
with hints of the great art that already had 
passed. 

Brussels is full of these, and Antwerp; Lou- 
vain had them, and Ypres, Termonde, Arras, 
and Charleville, only a few months ago; in Bruges 
and Ghent they fill whole streets and stand in 
silent accusation of what we of the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries have offered as our contri- 
bution to the housing of civilisation. 

Of the civic halls the list is endless: Brussels, 



8 HEART OF EUROPE 

Malines, Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, Antwerp, Mons, 
Audenaarde, Termonde and Liege; Compiegne, St. 
Quentin, Arras, Valenciennes; ranging from the 
grave solemnity of the enormous and wide-spread 
Ypres to the lacy fantasticism of Louvain and 
Audenaarde. Architecture has gone far from the 
Salle Synodale of Sens and the Merveille of 
Mont-St.-Michel, and it has not gone altogether 
well, but how significant these stone fancies are 
of the abounding life and the splendid pride and 
the open-handed beneficence of the fifteenth-cen- 
tury burghers, who loved their towns and bent the 
rebellious masonry to their will, working it into 
a kind of stony lace and embroidery to the glory 
of trade and civic spirit ! If we should lose them 
now, as we almost lost Louvain, standing in the 
midst of the roaring flame and drifting smoke, 
while tall churches and rich universities and fair 
old houses crumbled and died around it, what 
should we not lose ? 

And the churches, those matchless monuments, 
four, five, and six centuries old, where genera- 
tions have brought all their best to glorify God, 
where glass and sculpture, tapestries and fretted 
woodwork, pictures, and gold and silver wrought 
cunningly into immortal art — how are we to 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 9 

speak of these, or think of them, with St. Pierre 
of Louvain and St. Rombaut of Malines still 
smoking with their dying fires, while piece by 
piece the calcined stone falls in the embers, and 
while Reims, one of the wonders of the world, 
stands gaunt and shattered, wrecked by bombs, 
swept by fire, its windows that rivalled Chartres 
split into irremediable ruin, its statues devastated 
that once stood on a level with the sculptures of 
Greece ? 

The catastrophe itself is so unthinkable that the 
world does not now half realise it. And yet, what 
of all that remains in the pathway — backward 
or forward — of Attila and his Huns? St. Gudule 
of Brussels, St. Bavon of Ghent, and the cathe- 
drals of Antwerp, Tongres, and Tournai; and in 
France that matchless sequence of which Reims 
was once the central jewel, Soissons, Senlis and 
Noyon, St. Remi, Amiens, and Laon; here, with 
Reims, are seven churches such as man . never 
surpassed, and equalled only at Paris, Chartres, 
Coutances, and Bourges; each is of a different 
timbre, each a different expression of the greatest 
century of Christian civilisation, and, given the 
opportunity, there is no reason why each should 
not suffer the fate of Reims. 



10 HEART OF EUROPE 

There is a thin and sinister philosophy, akin 
to that of Treitschke and Nietzsche (which is for 
to-day what Machiavelli was for the sixteenth 
century), that avows no building, no consummate 
work of art of any kind, "worth the bones of a 
Pomeranian grenadier," justifying its statement 
on the basis of a superficial humanism. Never 
was a more malignant ethic. A man is valuable 
in proportion to what he is and does for right- 
eous society, and for what he makes of himself as 
a free and immortal soul responsible to God. 
Go through the roaring mills of Crefeld and 
Essen, the futile pleasure-haunts of Homburg and 
Wiesbaden, the bureaux and barracks and pal- 
aces of Berlin; you will find — as similarly in 
every country — hundreds of thousands of peas- 
ants, workmen, and aristocrats whose contribu- 
tion to Christian civilisation is nothing, and will 
be nothing however long they may live; who for- 
get their souls and deny their God, and of these 
we can say, it is not the bones of a Pomeranian 
grenadier or even the bones of a Prussian Junker 
that weigh more in the scale than Reims or Lou- 
vain, it is not a million of these that mean so 
much for service and the glory of God, as one 
such potent influence as Amiens or Reims, or the 



A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 11 

library and schools of Lou vain, or the pictures of 
Memling and the Van Eycks in Bruges and Ant- 
werp and Ghent. 

Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of hu- 
man life and its priority before art and letters, 
most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives 
against inevitable death, and spread black star- 
vation over myriads of women and children, in 
order that their privilege of selling inferior and 
unnecessary products to far-away savages may be 
preserved intact. Against this set the cathedrals 
and universities and the exquisite art of France 
and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it 
meant once, what it means even now, what for the 
future it is destined to mean as never before. 

For the old passes: the old that began with 
Machiavelli and is ending with von Bernhardi. 
It is not alone Prussia that will be purged by the 
fire of an inevitable conflict, nor Germany, nor 
all the Teuton lands; it is the whole world, that 
sold its birthright for a mess of pottage and now, 
in terror of the price at last to be paid, denounces 
the infamous contract and fights to the death 
against the armies of the Moloch it helped to 
fashion. And when the field is won, what hap- 
pens but the coming into its own again of the 



12 HEART OF EUROPE 

very power that made Reims and Louvain, the 
recovery of the old and righteous and Christian 
standard of values, the building on the ruins of 
five centuries of a new civilisation where what- 
ever art that remains will play its due part as the 
revealer of that Absolute Truth that brought it 
into being, forgotten now for very long? Then 
the pictures of Flanders and Umbria and Tus- 
cany, the sculpture of France, the music of Teu- 
ton and Slav, the "minor arts" of all medieval- 
ism, the architecture of Bourges and Amiens and 
Chartres will both reveal and inspire with doubled 
power. 

And in all and through all, Reims in its ruin 
will be a more potent agency of regeneration 
than the perfection of Chartres or the finality 
of Bourges. 

I should like to consider, though briefly and in 
the light of a very real unity that negatived the 
political disunity that has always prevailed, the 
art of these lands where for a twelvemonth mil- 
lions of men have fought after a fashion never 
known before, while around them each day saw 
the irreparable destruction of the best that man 
could do for the love of God, and better than 
he can do now. In spite of constantly changing 




4§ 




A SANCTUARY LAID WASTE 13 

frontiers and dynastic vicissitudes, the great unity 
of mediae valism blends the Rhineland, Flanders, 
Brabant, Luxembourg, Artois, Champagne, East- 
ern Normandy, Eastern France, into a consistent 
whole, so far as all real things are concerned. 
In spite of its bickerings and fightings and jeal- 
ousies and plots and counterplots, Europe was 
really more united, more a working whole, during 
the Middle Ages than ever it has been since. 
One religion and one philosophy did for the 
fluctuant states what the Reformation, democ- 
racy, and " enlightenment" could only undo, and 
in this vanishing art, which, after all, is the truest 
history man can record, we find the dynamic 
force, the creative power, of a culture and a 
civilisation that took little count of artificial 
barriers between perfectly artificial nations, but 
included all in the greatest and most beneficent 
syntheses Europe has ever known. 

The art of this land — or these lands, if you 
like — should be so considered; not as an inter- 
esting and even stimulating by-product of social, 
industrial, and political evolution, with only an 
accidental relationship to them, and only an 
empirical interest for the men of to-day, but as 
the most perfect material expression of the great 



14 HEART OF EUROPE 

reality that existed through and by these agencies 
that were in themselves nothing; the character 
that emerged through the turmoil of human ac- 
tivity, as it shows itself in the men and women of 
the time, and expresses itself in their art. 

To do this fully is impossible; every province 
would require a volume, every art a series of 
volumes, but at least we can catalogue again the 
more salient qualities of the greater master- 
pieces, and try to co-ordinate them into some out- 
ward semblance of that essential unity they both 
promised and expressed. 



II 

THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 

IT is not a large land, this Heart of Europe; 
three hundred and fifty miles perhaps from the 
Alps to the sea, and not more than two hundred 
and fifty from the Seine at Paris to the Rhine at 
Cologne; half the size, shall we say, of Texas; 
but what Europe was for the thousand years 
following the fall of Rome, this little country — 
or the men that made it great — was responsible. 
Add the rest of Normandy, and the spiritual 
energy of the Holy See, with a varying and some- 
times negligible influence from the Teutonic lands 
beyond the Rhine, and you have the mainsprings 
of mediae valism, even though for its full mani- 
festation you must take into account the men in 
the far countries of the Italian peninsula and the 
Iberian, in France and England, Bavaria, Sax- 
ony, Bohemia. 

The great empires of to-day, England, France, 
Germany, Italy, two of which have eaten steadily 
into its territories until only a tiny Luxembourg 
remains, together with a small new state with a 

15 



16 HEART OF EUROPE 

novel name made greater and more lasting by the 
events of a year than those of its predecessors, 
have dulled the memory of an ancient unity, tak- 
ing to themselves at the same time credit, that is 
none of theirs, for men and happenings that made 
ten centuries of enduring history; so the glory, 
the high achievements of the small old states are 
forgotten. And yet, out of these little dukedoms 
and counties and free cities came the men who 
made France and Germany, who determined the 
genius of medievalism, imparted to it the high 
soul and the swift hand of its peculiar person- 
ality, and gave to the world the memory and 
tradition of faith and heroism, together with so 
much of that inimitable art that was its perfect 
showing forth, and, until yesterday, a visible mon- 
ument of its accomplishment. 

National unity this territory and these peoples 
have never possessed. During the Roman domin- 
ion they formed the provinces of Germania and 
Belgica, in the diocese of Gaul; under the Mero- 
vings all was comprised in the Frankish kingdom, 
the old line between the Roman provinces re- 
maining to divide Austrasia and Neustria, as the 
northern and southern sections came to be called 
under the Carolings. With the disruption of the 



THE FORGING OF MEDLEVALISM 17 

empire of Charlemagne, Austrasia went to the 
kingdom of the East Franks, Neustria to that 
of the West Franks, the former becoming (west 
of the Rhine) the duchies of Upper and Lower 
Lorraine, the latter (east of the Seine) Flanders 
and Champagne. When Otto the Great restored 
the Holy Roman Empire in A. D. 962, the Lor- 
raines of course formed a part. These comprised 
all that is now (or was, in June, 1915) Germany 
west of the Rhine, together with all of Belgium 
except Flanders, Luxembourg, and a strip of 
territory along the northeast frontier of France. 
Westward to the Seine the land was divided into 
many feudal holdings, Flanders, which then com- 
prised not only northern Belgium but the present 
French departments of Nord and Pas de Calais; 
Champagne, Amiens, Vermandois, Laon, Reims, 
Chalons. During the Middle Ages Lower Lor- 
raine became the duchy of Brabant and the 
county of Hainault. Upper Lorraine, Luxem- 
bourg and Bar, southern Flanders, Artois. Pic- 
ardy and Valois became entities, and the great 
bishoprics of Cologne, Treves, Strasbourg, Cam- 
bray, Liege acquired more and more land until 
they were principalities in themselves. 

During the fifteenth century the magnificent 



18 HEART OF EUROPE 

efforts of the dukes of Burgundy to create for 
themselves an independent state between France 
and the Empire, and reaching from the Rhine to 
the Aisne, from the Alps to the sea, resulted in 
a partial and temporary unification of the old 
Belgian lands, but with the death of Mary of 
Burgundy in 1482, the whole territory became 
more and more closely knit into the Empire, 
France losing even her claim to suzerainty over 
Flanders; all the lands west of the Meuse and 
over the Rhine as far as the Ems became the 
Netherlands, comprising roughly what is now 
Holland and Belgium. The duchies of Luxem- 
bourg, Bar, and Lorraine, with the Palatinate, 
shared all that lay between the Meuse and the 
Rhine, save what the great bishoprics had as- 
sumed to themselves, while Burgundy (except the 
Franche-Comte) and Lorraine were definitively 
merged in France. 

Then came the Spanish dominion over the 
whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along 
the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the sever- 
ing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine 
from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, 
after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was 
driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 19 

Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself 
there until the time of Napoleon a century later, 
when for a few years everything as far as the 
Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the 
other side, was incorporated in France. With 
the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic 
empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them 
now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy 
of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to 
Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing 
area and the French frontier delimited as it is 
now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were 
lost in 1870. 

Between the upper and nether millstones of 
France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for 
fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments 
of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into 
unity, but producing ever in spite of political 
chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of 
piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifes- 
tations of the vigour and nobility of race, great 
figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles 
that have made so much of the brilliant history 
of mediaeval Europe, and all centring around the 
lands of the many tribes who from earliest times 
were known as the Belgse. 



20 HEART OF EUROPE 

They enter well into history, these Belgae, in 
the fifty-seventh year before the birth of Christ, 
Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the valleys 
of the Meuse and the Sambre, as Caesar found 
and declared, "that day against the Nervii," when 
the battle for the winning of this new land 
was his by hardly more than a chance. The 
tribes were hard and free, and they died in the 
end almost to a man, five hundred remaining out 
of fifty thousand warriors. But Caesar was mag- 
nanimous, as always, and by no means without 
appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of Rome, 
with full claim on her protection, they became, 
with the rank and title of a free people, as they 
have remained at heart ever since. In seven 
years the last of the tribes had surrendered and 
Belgium became a flourishing colony as well as 
the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in its 
progress against the savage Germans of the 
Rhine. By the fall of the Empire a great and 
united people had come into being between Gaul 
and Germania, divided into four great sections 
with their several capitols at Treves, Reims, 
Mainz, and Cologne. 

Meanwhile the Franks had come on the scene, 
though their name is rather a rallying-cry than 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 21 

a mark of race, meaning only that certain of the 
tribes of Gaul, with others of the Belgse, were 
determined to be free — as they became shortly 
and as they have generally remained ever since. 
Now the Salian Franks were the dwellers in 
Flanders and Brabant and under their Duke 
Clodion had extended their borders as far as 
Soissons. Clodion's successor, Merovseus, was 
grandfather of Clovis, the first Christian king of 
the north. The Merovings, then, are neither 
strictly of Gaul nor of Germany, but of the Heart 
of Europe itself, and their blood, like that of 
their followers, a mingling of Germanic and 
Celtic and Roman strains. 

Chalons saw them allied with the Romans and 
driving back the fierce tide of the earlier Huns 
that threatened to beat out the last flicker of 
light in Europe: Tolbiac saw them hurl back the 
savage Allemanni, in the year 496, again preserv- 
ing the European tradition from submergence 
under barbarian hordes, nor was this the last 
time they were to perform this service. Already 
Clovis had married Clotilde, niece of the Duke 
of Burgundy, so bringing another region into 
close contact with his own, and now, after the 
successful issue of the battle of Tolbiac, when 



22 HEART OF EUROPE 

he had first called on the God of Christians, he 
presented himself before the Archbishop of Reims, 
St. Remi, for baptism, where he heard the signif- 
icant words: "Bow thy proud head, Sicambrian ! 
destroy what thou hast worshipped, worship 
what thou hast destroyed." 

Whatever the motive, and however inadequate 
the performance of his new obligations by Clovis, 
his baptism is one of the crucial events in history, 
marking the end of paganism as a controlling 
force, and with the conquest of Italy by Theo- 
doric and the promulgation of the Holy Rule of 
St. Benedict, the beginning of the great Christian 
era of culture and civilisation that was to endure, 
unimpaired, for a thousand years. 

The dominion of Clovis comprised all that is 
now France south to the Loire and Burgundy, 
with Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Bavaria, 
but his capitol was at Tournai, and he was in 
fact even more a Belgian than a French sover- 
eign. Under him all the Franks were united and 
his power was such that the Emperor at Constan- 
tinople made him patrician, consul, and Augus- 
tus. With his death in 511 began a long era of 
division and reunion, of internecine warfare and the 
plotting of jealous women, two of whom, Frede- 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 23 

gonde personifying the Gallic influence, Brunhilde 
the Germanic, fostered a conflict that hardly 
came to an end before the fall of the dynasty. 

Little by little the Merovings broke away from 
their racial Belgic affiliations, Soissons became 
the capital rather than Tournai, and at last by a 
dramatic turn of fate another Belgian race brought 
the decrepit line to its term and founded a new 
and a nobler house. Pepin of Landen, in the 
province of Liege, became mayor of the palace 
and the active influence in royal affairs, some- 
where about the year 620, and it was a son of his 
daughter, Pepin of Herstel (a town also in the 
province of Liege), who was father of Charles 
Martel, who in his turn was the grandfather of 
Charlemagne. 

As the Huns and the Allemanni had been rolled 
back from their savage incursions by the aid of 
men of Belgic nationality, so now the greater 
threat of an onrushing Monammedanism was to be 
dispelled by another and a greater personality, 
Charles the Hammer, a soldier of consummate 
ability, the real ruler of all the Franks, and the 
victor at the battle of Tours when final decision 
was reached as to whether Europe was for the 
future to be Moslem or Christian. 



U HEART OF EUROPE 

Charles Martel died when only fifty years of 
age, and his son Pepin succeeded him as mayor 
of the palace. The fiction of Meroving kingship 
could no longer be maintained; the stock was 
hopelessly degenerate; the people demanded an 
end, the Pope sanctioned it, and so, after a most 
orderly fashion Childeric III betook himself to a 
convenient cloister, Pepin was raised on the 
shields of the Gallic soldiers, then decently 
crowned in St. Denis, and the dynasty of the Car- 
olings began. For sixteen years he reigned as 
kings had not been wont to reign for many cen- 
turies; Saxony, Brittany, Languedoc were added 
to the Frankish dominions, Rome twice saved 
from the Lombard invaders, and the Papacy made 
the faithful ally and defender of the Frankish 
kingdom, then the one great power in Europe. 

There were more reasons than that of policy 
for this alliance. Practically abandoned by the 
Roman Emperors in the east, Italy had been the 
prey of tribe after tribe of northern savages, and 
the Papacy was the only centre of order and 
authority. In spite of this the Popes still shrank 
from severing themselves wholly from the imperial 
centre, but the iconoclastic controversy had re- 
sulted in what was both heresy and schism on 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 25 

the part of the patriarchate of Constantinople, 
and communion was no longer possible. More- 
over, all the other northern tribes that had ac- 
cepted Christianity — Goths, Vandals, Lombards — 
had adopted the Arian heresy and were therefore 
even more distasteful to Rome than unconverted 
heathen. This condition of things justified the 
Papacy in its attitude of intolerance, and when 
Pepin came to the throne, it was almost at the 
last gasp, through persecution, spoliation, and out- 
rage at the hands of the Teutonic Arians. The 
Frankish kingdom alone was Catholic, and en- 
thusiastically Catholic, and it is small wonder that 
to the Pope the rise of a great and powerful and 
Catholic nation under the dominating Carolings 
came as a special mercy from heaven — as, indeed, 
it was. 

With the death of Pepin and the accession of 
his son Charles — known now for all time as 
Charlemagne — the curtain rose on one of the 
most brilliant dramas of history. The Lombards 
had again revolted; Pope Hadrian called on the 
Franks in despair; King Charles hurled his 
armies into Italy like an avalanche, captured and 
deposed Desiderius, last of the Lombard kings, 
proclaimed himself King of Lombardy, pressed 



26 HEART OF EUROPE 

on to Rome, and was welcomed there by the 
Supreme Pontiff as the saviour of Christendom. 

He would, however, accept no formal honours 
save that of patrician, and returned to the north 
to continue the work of his father in consolidat- 
ing and extending the kingdom. For twenty- 
four years he was engaged in innumerable wars, 
in eager efforts to restore education, political 
order, ecclesiastical righteousness, and even some 
small measure of genuine culture, with results 
that seem miraculous in the light of what had 
been before for so many centuries. Finally, in 
the year 799, he went again to Rome, where Leo 
III now sat in the chair of Peter, and at mass on 
Christmas Day, A. D. 800, the Pope came sud- 
denly behind him as he was kneeling before the 
altar in St. Peter's and, placing a crown on his 
head, cried in a loud voice: "Life and victory to 
Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the 
Romans, crowned by the hand of God !" and after 
three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism, 
and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored 
as the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of a 
Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belgse, and 
destined to endure for another thousand years. 

Aix-la-Chapelle is the very centre of the land 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 27 

and the people that built up the Christian civili- 
sation of the Middle Ages, and it was here that 
Charlemagne fixed his chief place of residence. 
During his lifetime it was the very, and the only, 
centre of order and of culture in Europe. A 
great warrior, he was an even greater adminis- 
trator, while as the restorer of learning and the 
patron of art and letters he was perhaps greatest 
of all. When he came to the throne there lay 
behind him nearly four centuries of absolute 
anarchy and barbarism, from the Baltic to the 
Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the 
marches of the Teutonic savages. What he 
built he built from the ground upward, and 
though his was only the "false dawn" that heralds 
the day, passing utterly, so far as one could see, 
within a generation after his death, it was the 
saving of Europe, the preservation of the succes- 
sion, that, the second Dark Ages overpassed, 
guaranteed the coming in of the great era that 
began with the millennial year of Christianity 
and lasted for five full centuries. 

Under his direction a complete administrative 
system was established over the unwieldy empire; 
local governments were set up, with a system of 
regular visitations from the central authority, 



28 HEART OF EUROPE 

and in this way the foundations were laid fcr 
the counties of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, into 
which, together with Vermandois, Valois, Amiens, 
and Champagne, this territory of our survey was 
divided during the Middle Ages. 

In religion, education, and art Charlemagne 
went far beyond his predecessors for five cen- 
turies, so far as the form and re-creation are con- 
cerned. Separated at last from the church in 
the East, now definitely schismatic, heretical, and 
Erastian, the Papacy was in a position to go on 
unhindered in its development, and Charlemagne 
became not only a defender but a zealous and 
enthusiastic reformer. Monasticism was univer- 
sally strengthened and extended, new bishoprics 
were founded, the state of the Holy See purified, 
while schools were established in connection with 
cathedrals and monasteries throughout the Em- 
pire. Charles had a great passion for scholars 
and artists, gathering them from Italy, Spain, 
England, wherever, indeed, they were to be found, 
and for a time his court was the nucleus of cul- 
ture in the West. Architecture was reborn, all 
the ravelled threads from Rome, Constantinople, 
Ravenna, Syria were gathered up and knit to- 
gether, and though few authentic works from 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 29 

among the myriads of the Emperor's creation still 
remain, we know from what we have, and chiefly 
the royal chapel at Aix, that the result was the 
restoring once more of a line of continuity after 
the vast vacancy of the Dark Ages, and the ini- 
tiation of a new vitality that, after the second 
Dark Ages, was to serve as the energising power 
that brought Romanesque art into existence and 
made possible the great glory of Gothic. 

Great as he was, Charlemagne had all the 
weaknesses of his racial tradition, and by yield- 
ing to these his era was his alone, nor could it 
outlast his personal influence. Divided between 
his successors, the Empire rapidly and naturally 
fell to pieces during the lifetime of Louis le Deb- 
onnaire, who for a brief period had succeeded in 
uniting it again, and during the second Dark 
Ages, from 850 to 1000 A. D., there is no more of 
note to record in this region than in any other part 
of Europe. The era had culminated under Char- 
lemagne; it was now to sink to its end, as always 
had happened before, as always, so far as we can 
see, must continue to happen. Not until the turn 
of the tide at the year 1000 could a real recovery 
begin. In the meantime history is little more 
than a series of personal contests, but out of these 



30 HEART OF EUROPE 

certain beginnings are made that are to have 
issue in great things, and amongst these are the 
appearance of the first Baldwin of Flanders and 
the establishing of the first hereditary title, and 
therefore the oldest in Europe. Baldwin of the 
Iron Arm successfully fought the Vikings, driv- 
ing them west until they were forced to con- 
tent themselves with the land they ultimately 
made immortal as Normandy. His son married 
a daughter of Alfred the Great, so establishing a 
certain connection between England and Flan- 
ders, and by fortifying Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, and 
Courtrai, he did much toward fixing these cities 
as centres of municipal life and of that fierce in- 
dependence that marked them for so many gen- 
erations. 

With the opening of the new era, at the begin- 
ning of the eleventh century, a new vitality shows 
itself in the land. William of Normandy had 
become the son-in-law of Baldwin V, and from 
Flanders many knights joined the Conqueror for 
his invasion of England, one becoming first Earl 
of Northumberland, another first Earl of Chester. 
Under Baldwin VI complete peace was restored 
to the distracted provinces, while the Charter of 
Grammont is a landmark in that development 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 31 

of personal and civil liberty which is one of 
the great glories of mediae valism. The Tribunal 
of Peace, established by the Bishop of Liege, is 
another shining sign of the times, while the de- 
feat of France in its attacks on Flemish indepen- 
dence assured a long period of splendid develop- 
ment. 

This was enhanced by the Crusades, and here, 
particularly in the first, the Heart of Europe 
showed the quality of the blood that was its life. 
Whatever the Crusades may have become after 
long years, they were in their earliest impulse 
supreme examples of human faith, unselfishness, 
devotion, heroism, and piety. The redemption of 
the Holy Places of Christianity from the infidel 
became a passion, and the protagonist, the mov- 
ing and vitalising spirit, was one Peter the Hermit, 
of the province of Liege, who, crucifix in hand, 
toiled through eastern France, the Netherlands, 
the Rhineland, as well as through his own coun- 
try, exhorting prince and peasant to take up 
arms for the freeing of the Holy Land from the 
Saracen. 

His success was almost miraculous, for the 
great adventure appealed to every instinct of 
the time — piety, reverence, chivalry, romance, 



32 HEART OF EUROPE 

the passion for a new and venturesome and 
knightly quest — and in less than two years the 
Pope himself set his seal of approbation on the 
First Crusade. In Clermont, in the year 1095, 
surrounded by four hundred bishops and mitred 
abbots, he cried to the waiting multitudes of 
Europe: "Are we called upon to see in this cen- 
tury the desolation of Christianity and to re- 
main at peace the while our holy religion is 
given over into the hands of the oppressor ? Here 
is a lawful war; go, defend the House of Israel !" 
Almost with a single voice Europe made answer 
with the rally ing-cry: "God wills it!" Every 
scarlet garment was shredded Jn pieces to furnish 
crosses which were sewn to the shoulders; some 
even branded themselves with the sign of the 
cross by means of red-hot irons. 

Within another year an army of 100,000 men 
had been gathered together, under the leader- 
ship of Peter, himself, and it poured across Eu- 
rope as far as Constantinople, a disorganised and 
impotent mob. It met its fate as soon as it 
had crossed the Bosporus into Saracen territory, 
and only a shattered remnant, including the 
originator of the mad venture, ever returned to 
its home. In the meantime, however, a greater 



THE FORGING OF MEDIEVALISM 33 

captain than Peter the Hermit, and of the same 
race, was gathering the enormous host that suc- 
ceeded where he had failed. Godfrey of Bouillon, 
of the province of Liege, a great scholar and 
greater soldier, gathered 90,000 knights and 
men-at-arms in Flanders and Brabant, and set 
out for Jerusalem on the 10th of August, 1096. 
A month later the French under command of the 
King's brother, and the Flemings under Robert, 
Count of Flanders, followed in his track. Baldwin 
of Bourg, the Counts of Hainault, Namur, Grez, 
Audenaarde, and Ypres, with knights of Dixmude, 
Alost, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Tournai 
were amongst the leaders, and a concentration 
was effected at Constantinople when there were 
no less than 600,000 in all. Crossing into Asia, 
the great host swept onward from one victory 
to another; the battle of Dorykeum, fought on 
the 4th of July, 1097, proved them invincible. 
Tarsus and Antioch fell, and nothing lay between 
them and Jerusalem. The city was besieged and 
finally carried by assault, the attack beginning 
on the 14th of July, and after a week of incessant 
fighting on the walls and through the streets, 
Jerusalem was wholly in the hands of the Cru- 
saders. But the host that set out from its many 



34 HEART OF EUROPE 

sources in Europe had vanished and only a tenth 
of the original number remained to fight the re- 
lieving army from Egypt at Ascalon, and to 
organise the victory. Five hundred thousand 
men had perished on the long march, died of dis- 
ease, or fallen in battle. 

Godfrey of Bouillon became the first King of 
Jerusalem, the choice resting between him and 
Robert of Flanders. He reigned only a year, and 
was succeeded by his brother Baldwin, who had 
made himself Count of Edessa, and whose descen- 
dants continued on the throne for several gen- 
erations. 

In all the succeeding Crusades, Flanders and 
Brabant, Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy 
played leading parts, and in the fifth, when the 
arms of the knights were turned from the relief 
of Jerusalem to the conquest of the Byzantine 
Empire, another Baldwin of Flanders was leader, 
and, after the fall of Constantinople, became the 
first Latin Emperor of the East, his dynasty con- 
tinuing on the throne for fifty years. 

Amazing as were the results of the Crusades, 
with the conquering of the Saracens in the Holy 
Land, and the overthrow of the Eastern Empire, 
a Walloon being crowned first King of Jerusalem 



THE FORGING OF MEDLEVALISM 35 

and a Fleming first Latin Emperor of Byzantium, 
the local results had no permanency, Jerusalem 
falling again to the Mussulmans after a century 
and a half, Constantinople reverting to the East- 
ern line at about the same time. In Europe, 
however, the results had been of profound import; 
directly, the Crusades had had a vast influence 
in determining the temper and the course of 
medievalism, indirectly they had laid the founda- 
tions of the industrial supremacy of the Belgian 
cities and of the emancipation of the people from 
feudalism. The Saracen of the twelfth century 
was the antithesis of the Ottoman Turk of to-day, 
and from him the Crusaders learned much to 
their advantage, while from the Eastern Empire 
came new impulses toward the development of a 
broader culture than the West alone could have 
achieved. So far as the cities of Flanders, Bra- 
bant, and Lorraine were concerned, the absence 
of their martial and turbulent knights was by no 
means an unmixed catastrophe. The vast expedi- 
tions demanded vast expenditures: money came 
generally into use in place of barter; the common 
people who remained at home developed their 
industries, increased their wealth, and in the end 
took into their own hands much of the business 



36 HEART OF EUROPE 

of the government. The habit and tradition of 
independence and liberty which so grew up, 
maintained itself steadily against all assaults, 
nor has it lapsed or waned, as the last year has 
gloriously proved, and many of the tall towers 
that became the recognised symbol of civic in- 
dependence still stand in testimony, though one 
by one they are falling before the armed nega- 
tion of all they rose to proclaim. 



Ill 

FLANDERS AND BRABANT 

IN a study such as this tries to be, it is, of course, 
impossible to consider in any degree the his- 
tory of those portions of the chosen territory 
that joined themselves to, or were by force in- 
corporated in, the great surrounding states. The 
Rhineland, in spite of its minor vicissitudes of 
lordship, is and has always been Germanic, and 
its annals are part and parcel of those of the 
Teutonic Holy Roman Empire and of the Ger- 
man Empire that succeeded it. The marshes of 
the mouth of the Rhine early differentiated them- 
selves both from Germany and from the Gallic 
provinces farther south; Dutch they were and 
Dutch they will ever remain; their history and 
their culture and their art are by themselves. 
The same is true of Champagne, Picardy, Bur- 
gundy, Bar, and of the lands between them and 
the Seine. This is France, and its history is the 
history of France even if its art takes enduring 
colour from a persistent quality in its people that 

is its own and not simply that of the Franks and 

37 



38 HEART OF EUROPE 

Normans and Celts who coalesced around the 
old lie de France to the building of one of the 
great peoples and one of the great states in his- 
tory. Each gave more than it received when 
it became a part of a state that was slowly build- 
ing itself out of assembling races and peoples, 
but each was like the daughter of a house; how- 
ever much she might bring to some alliance, of 
fortune or character or power, she became merged 
in her new family, forsaking her name and ac- 
cepting that of her chosen spouse, together with 
his ambitions, his interests, and his fortunes. 
We may then consider the outlying lands of our 
central district as so many fair daughters who 
have allied themselves with suitors from neigh- 
bouring territories; remembering them with affec- 
tion, taking pride in the dowries they have 
carried with them, but confining ourselves to the 
fortunes of the men of the line who have pre- 
served the family name and defended its honour 
in the field. In this sense Flanders, Brabant, and 
Luxembourg are the three princes to whom was 
given the defence of the patrimony that has been 
theirs from the ancient times of the earliest be- 
ginnings of the house amongst the Gallic and 
Germanic tribes of the Rhine valley, the meadows 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 39 

and uplands of the Scheldt and the Meuse and the 
Sambre, and in the Forest of Ardennes. 

As the Heart of Europe gradually became par- 
celled out between the great adjoining empires, 
each taking its colour more or less from the cen- 
tral influences, while in every instance contribut- 
ing something in its turn to the sum that made 
up the varying greatness of both, the essential 
qualities of the original Belgse seemed to con- 
centrate in the little province of Flanders, which, 
during the whole of the Middle Ages, played a 
part in Europe strikingly disproportionate to its 
size, which was less than half that of the State 
of Connecticut, though it contained over 1,200,- 
000 people and counted cities like Ghent with 
250,000 population, Ypres with 200,000, Bruges 
and Courtrai with 100,000 each. At the same 
time London could boast only 35,000 citizens. In 
trade, industry, wealth, culture, and the stand- 
ard of living Flanders was far in advance of the 
rest of northern Europe, while it was marked by a 
perfect passion for liberty not only for the state 
but for each individual member thereof. 

Every portion of the land we are considering 
made its own contribution, early or late, to the 
great sum of medievalism, but it would be im- 



40 HEART OF EUROPE 

possible to consider, even superficially, the gifts 
of Champagne, Burgundy, the Rhineland. This 
book does not assume to be a history, it is only a 
sequence of notes on the lost or imperilled art of 
the Heart of Europe, with just so much of history 
as may serve to suggest what lay behind and gave 
this art its peculiar and unmatched quality. 

The great elements that entered into this art 
and this civilisation that were pre-eminently the 
art and civilisation of Christianity were primarily 
two: northern blood and monastic fervour. To 
the worn-out vitality of the Mediterranean races 
came in the fresh vigour of the North, Lombard, 
Germanic, Norman, Frank, while the monastic 
impulse imparted by St. Benedict broke the spell 
of the Dark Ages, made possible the "false 
dawn" of Carolingian civilisation, and then, 
through its successors, the monks of Cluny in 
the eleventh century and the Cistercians in the 
twelfth, brought to perfection and to complete 
fulness of expression all the latent possibilities in 
the clean new blood that had been transfused 
into the hardening veins of an Europe already 
dangerously near dissolution. 

These elements of new blood were chiefly sup- 
plied by the Franks (both of the East and the 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 41 

West) , the Burgundians, and the Normans, the lat- 
ter being descendants of the Vikings from the 
Baltic. The Belgae were a subdivision of the 
Franks, and made up of several tribes, Trevii, 
Eburones, Nervii, etc. Generally speaking, they 
were Germanic, with a considerable Celtic admix- 
ture. The Cluniac and Cistercian reforms came 
from Burgundy, which is partially within the limits 
of our study, though later they received great ac- 
cessions of strength from natives of Flanders, 
Brabant, the Rhineland, and Champagne. During 
the eleventh century Normandy was the spiritual 
centre, the dynamic force, of Europe, while in the 
twelfth century the leadership was assumed by 
the lie de France, as wholly under the inspira- 
tion of the Cistercians as Normandy had been 
under that of the Cluniacs. It was during these 
two centuries that the great burst of Norman and 
of Gothic architecture occurred in the lie de 
France, in Normandy, and in Champagne. 

The contributions of the land we now know 
as Belgium were quite different; they were at 
the same time a product of mediaeval culture and 
one of its causes, for they grew out of the deep 
and vital impulses beneath the whole epoch, 
while they seemed to determine many of its 



42 HEART OF EUROPE 

manifestations. The first of these, the Crusades, 
has already been referred to; the second, the 
great guild system, with its concomitant, the com- 
mune, and its result, a desire for personal, civic, 
and national liberty that became a passion, needs 
some consideration, since it is from this that came 
so much of the later mediaeval art of Flanders and 
Brabant that is so priceless and so appallingly 
in danger of destruction. 

Just how and why the Flemings should have 
become a nation of weavers, merchants, and 
traders is hard to say, but even in the tenth cen- 
tury, weaving had become so important an in- 
dustry a charter was granted the guild of weavers 
by Count Baldwin. The supply of wool came 
overseas from England, where an important 
market for the finished wares was also found, 
and as a result a close community of interests 
sprang up between Flanders and East Anglia. 
Without natural protection of any kind, the land 
lying open to any invasion, walled cities became 
imperative, as well as unions for self-defence, 
and so came the great and rich and defiant cities 
such as Ghent and Bruges, Ypres and Courtrai. 
When the nobles and knights flocked off on cru- 
sade, the citizens remained at home, and they 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 43 

were not slow to seize the opportunity offered 
them of acquiring, almost without protest, the 
civil power that, elsewhere, under a dominant and 
universal feudalism, remained in the hands of the 
barons. 

By this time the development of the guilds had 
reached enormous proportions, and the members 
were so numerous, so highly organised, and so 
defiant of molestation they were almost irre- 
sistible. In Ghent, for example, there were more 
than 50,000 enrolled craftsmen and artificers in 
the thirteenth century; in Bruges there were the 
four great trading guilds of wool merchants, linen 
merchants, mercers, and brewers, and in addition 
no less than fifty-two guilds of craftsmen. These 
guilds were not only for the protection of the in- 
terests of their members, they equally aimed at 
maintaining the highest possible standard in their 
products (so differentiating themselves sharply 
from the contemporary trade-union), while they 
demanded and received civic rights and privileges 
unheard of before and elsewhere. Finally they 
were military as well as civil in their nature, all 
the members being trained to arms and under 
competent military direction. The actual power 
they could exert is shown by the fact that at one 



44 HEART OF EUROPE 

time the weavers in Ghent put an efficient army 
of 40,000 men into the field. Every man was 
bound to answer the alarm-bell of his own guild 
on the instant, and so came the great bell-towers 
that stood not only as the source of warning and 
the rallying-place, but also as visible evidences of 
the liberty of the men who obeyed the summons 
from their great bourdons. 

Never before or since has skilled labour oc- 
cupied a more advantageous position than in 
Flanders in the thirteenth century; wages were 
high, life liberal and self-respecting, comforts 
and even luxuries common to all, while the high 
standard of workmanship made labour dignified 
and enjoyable, and close union of interests guaran- 
teed the protection of all against the aggressions 
of the nobles and the feudal system. 

Offsetting the gains were corresponding losses. 
Successful industry, through group action, to- 
gether with the consequent development of the 
town unit, resulted in a general loss of any na- 
tional or racial spirit. The interests of each man 
were those of his guild or town, and during the 
entire Middle Ages there was the most kaleido- 
scopic grouping and regrouping of towns and 
provinces, now against the Empire, now against 




ST. BAVON'S TOWER, GHENT 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 45 

France, Burgundy, England, now against each 
other or some count or duke working in his turn 
for dynastic or political dominance. Another 
cause of dissension was the complicated absurdity 
of feudal tenure, whereby the French-speaking 
people of Brabant and Lorraine were united to 
the Empire, the Flemings to France, while, as 
happened in the case of the Count of Flanders, 
a prince might be one of the Twelve Peers of 
France, and a vassal of the King, and yet be vas- 
sal to the Emperor for portions of his land. The 
process of progressive unification which was tak- 
ing place elsewhere was here reversed, and by 
the end of the twelfth century Brabant had been 
broken up into five counties, while as far as the 
Seine were small and involved feudal domains and 
bishoprics, such as Hainault, Vermandois, Pon- 
tine vre, Amiens, Reims, Coucy, Beauvais. 

Flanders retained a certain unstable unity, 
and against this Philip Augustus of France set 
himself in his comprehensive policy of unifica- 
tion; after his first invasion Ferrand of Portugal, 
who had married the heiress of the last Baldwin 
of Flanders and Hainault, took the lead in form- 
ing an alliance with England and the Empire for 
the crushing of France and the division of the 



46 HEART OF EUROPE 

kingdom. Bouvines saw the ending of the am- 
bitious plot, and as well the beginnings of modern 
France. Later came the League of Grammont 
and the second attempt to destroy France, which 
failed also; but at the battle of Courtrai by the 
Lys, the Flemish army of 25,000 utterly de- 
feated a French force of double the number, with 
the loss of the proudest blood in France. A thou- 
sand knights fell, with 20,000 squires and men-at- 
arms, and in the Church of Our Lady of Courtrai, 
700 gold spurs, from the heels of dead knights, 
were hung to the glory of the great victory. 

So through the thirteenth century incessant 
fighting went on both in Flanders and Brabant, 
and in the great bishopric of Liege, the net result 
being the complete downfall of feudalism in ad- 
vance of the rest of Europe and the solidifying 
of the popular passion for personal liberty and 
self-government. 

The fourteenth century was the golden age of 
the communes and as well of renewed resistance 
to the continuous encroachments of France, when 
the brief period of the commercial alliance with 
England under Edward III came to an end. 
This English alliance, prompted by both com- 
mercial and political considerations, had been 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 47 

the dream of the first Van Artevelde, Jacques by 
name, the leader of the weavers of Ghent. For 
nine years he had laboured for the interests of his 
fellow guildsmen and Ghentois, supporting King 
Edward III in his claims on the crown of France, 
plotting and planning to preserve the indepen- 
dence of Flanders. He fell a victim, however, to 
the spirit of irresponsible faction which already 
had been the inevitable outcome of the demo- 
cratic, socialistic, and selfishly greedy elements 
inherent in an unhampered guild system, and 
was murdered by his own followers in the streets 
of Ghent. 

In the meantime Louis de Male, had become 
Count of Flanders, in succession to his father, 
Louis de Nevers, while Wenceslas of Luxembourg, 
son of the King of Bohemia, who had married 
one of the daughters of John III, became Duke 
of Brabant. Here, as in Flanders, the various 
guilds had gained a control that was periodically 
contested by the nobles, particularly in Lou vain, 
where the disorders continued for twenty years. 
In the end the cities were defeated, for they had 
used their power ill, determining their action by 
superhuman cruelty and greed, oppressing the 
weaker communes whenever they threatened their 



48 HEART OF EUROPE 

trade, fighting amongst themselves, splitting up 
into factions, and vacillating between sudden 
enthusiasms and corresponding treachery. Al- 
ready the tendency was setting in away from the 
mediaeval looseness, mobility, and even democ- 
racy in government, and toward that centralisa- 
tion coupled with autocracy which was to be the 
contribution of the Renaissance to the science of 
government and was to end in the absolutism of 
Henry VIII, Philip of Spain, and Louis XIV. 
Even if the guilds had shown a high standard of 
morals and of statesmanship, if the communes had 
been truly patriotic and national in their aims and 
methods, they could hardly have stood against 
a tendency already clearly defined and marking 
the new era, now coming to birth, as their high 
beginnings had marked that already drawing to 
its close. 

Louis made war against Brabant, lost, but re- 
gained Malines, which he had sold to his father- 
in-law of Brabant, and then turned his attention 
to a final suppression of Ghent, the last stronghold 
of the declining democracy of Flanders. It was 
in 1279 that Bruges asked for a canal to the Lys 
to make amends for the silting up of her only 
outlet to the sea. Ghent protested, fearing loss 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 49 

of her own trade, and took up arms when Louis 
granted the canal. The "White Hoods" defeated 
the forces sent against them, whereupon the fickle 
burgers of Bruges and Ypres went over to their 
side and long, hard fighting followed, until Louis 
found himself besieged in Audenaarde by some 
60,000 "White Hoods" and was only saved by the 
intervention of his son-in-law Charles of Burgundy. 
Retreating to France, with headquarters at Lille, 
he reorganised his forces, renewed the attack, cap- 
tured Ypres, and, one after the other, all the cities 
of Flanders except Ghent, to which he laid siege. 
At this last crisis in its fortunes Ghent turned to 
Philip, son of Jacques van Artevelde, who took 
command, organised a force of 5,000 men, led them 
against Count Louis' army of 40,000, attacked 
near Bruges, and defeated it utterly, Louis escap- 
ing only in the clothes of his servant. Bruges was 
occupied and its walls destroyed, Ypres and Cour- 
trai joined in with Ghent, and Bruges itself turned 
against its count. 

The issue was now fairly joined between com- 
mons and knights; Louis de Male made his cause 
that of order and the nobility against anarchy 
and the proletariat, the King of France and the 
Duke of Burgundy joined him, and under Oliver, 



50 HEART OF EUROPE 

constable of France, 80,000 men, amongst whom 
no communal levies were admitted, marched on 
Ghent and its allies. Against this force Philip 
van Artevelde mustered 40,000 men who advanced 
to the attack with a mad confidence born of their 
recent victory over Louis. In a thick fog they 
hurled themselves in a solid body on the centre 
of the enemy, broke it, saw victory before them, 
and then, the fog lifting, found themselves flanked 
on both sides by the constable's horse, and aban- 
doned themselves to a panic that ended in the 
slaughter of more than half their number, in- 
cluding Van Artevelde himself, whose brief day 
of success and glory had lasted exactly eleven 
months. 

The French sacked Courtrai and went home, 
whereupon Ghent again took heart of hope, and, 
aided by Henry Spencer, Bishop of Norwich, 
with 3,000 men, defied Louis and laid siege to 
Ypres, which was relieved by the returning 
French, and a truce was finally signed at Calais. 

It was the end of the democratic communes, 
not only in Flanders but in Brabant, where Duke 
Wenceslas at the same time had defeated the 
communes at Louvain, and as well in France, 
where the growing spirit of communal inde- 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 51 

pendence was wiped out by a king who had found 
in Flanders the proof that this cannot co-exist 
with a strong and centralised monarchy. 

Already industrial decline had set in; the 
country had been harried by French armies and 
by civil wars, many had gone overseas to Eng- 
land to establish there a rival industry that slowly 
sapped the prosperity of Flanders and Brabant. 
The Black Death had decimated the remaining 
population, and Bruges, Courtrai, Ypres, indeed 
nearly all the great towns but Ghent, slowly 
lost their population until hardly a tenth was 
left. Still a large degree of prosperity remained, 
and wealth was as much desired and as success- 
fully attained as before, only within narrower 
lines and by a far smaller number of people. 

When Louis de Male died, shortly after the 
victory of his French allies over the communes, 
his son-in-law, Philip the Bold, Duke of Bur- 
gundy, became Count of Flanders, and the fif- 
teenth century was dominated by Burgundian 
efforts to build up a strong central kingdom when 
it became evident that it could not control the 
destinies of France. Flanders, Brabant, and Na- 
mur were all incorporated in Burgundy, and later 
Holland and Hainault, so that it seemed for a 



52 HEART OF EUROPE 

time that a great central state might arise between 
the Empire and the kingdom of France. 

Philip's first efforts were to wean Flanders 
from its friendship with England in order that 
he might use the country for the invasion he had 
planned to bring about. He died in 1404 before 
he could carry out his schemes and was suc- 
ceeded by his son, John the Fearless, whose aim 
was the French crown, in opposition to the Duke 
of Orleans who had become supreme in Paris. 
He marched on the capital, which opened its 
gates to him, while Orleans took refuge in the 
south but returned and too confidingly patched 
up some kind of a peace with Burgundy, who 
had him assassinated in the streets of Paris in 
the following year. Out of his murder grew the 
league of the partisans of Orleans, the "Armag- 
nacs," who took their name from Count d'Ar- 
magnac, father-in-law of one of the daughters 
of the murdered duke, and the warfare between 
them and the house of Burgundy. 

In the meantime Henry V had laid claim to 
the French throne, had invaded France, and fought 
the battle of Agincourt. Thus far John the 
Fearless had kept out of the fight, but now he 
allied himself with the Dauphin and went to 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 53 

meet him at Montereau to seal his allegiance. 
Here he was in turn slain by the Armagnacs in 
revenge for his own murder of the Duke of Or- 
leans, and his son, Philip the Good, at once 
threw himself into the arms of England, against 
France, and it was he who handed over the B. 
Jeanne d'Arc to the Bishop of Beauvais, after her 
capture at Compiegne in 1430, as a witch and 
sorceress. 

Philip was more devoted to his new possessions 
than to his native Burgundy, and under him 
Bruges and Ghent took precedence of his old 
capital of Dijon. Philip also was the founder 
of the Order of the Golden Fleece on the oc- 
casion of one of his numerous marriages, this 
time in Bruges and to the Countess of Nevers. 
The marriage was a great event in many ways, 
for to it came the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, 
he being then Regent of France for the English 
king and realising that the triumphant career of 
Jeanne d'Arc was having results that urged him 
to make the most of the Duke of Burgundy, the 
only friend left to his royal master. The Golden 
Fleece, the oldest order on the Continent, was in- 
stituted in particular honour of Flanders, and 
especially the city of Bruges, the world centre of 



54 HEART OF EUROPE 

the wool trade. There were to be but twenty- 
four knights, under the leadership of the duke, 
and they were granted extraordinary privileges, 
amongst them immunity from all other states, 
princes and laws, being subject only to their 
sovereign master, though they remained citizens 
of their respective states, whatever those may 
have been. Philip II of Spain did away with 
this intolerable anomaly, and in 1725 the order 
was divided between Spain and Austria, so losing 
wholly its original and most distinctive quality 
as a signal honour especially pertaining to Flan- 
ders. 

By 1435 Philip, whose affection for England 
had been at the best lukewarm, could bear no 
longer the appalling misery of France and the 
excesses of the English armies. All north of the 
Loire had become a wilderness and even in the 
later Middle Ages pity was a feeling still easily 
aroused. By the treaty of Arras Burgundy 
finally separated itself from the English alliance 
and joined Charles VII, the immediate result 
being a letting-up of the war in France and a 
transferring of hostilities to Flanders. The duke 
led an enthusiastic force of Flemings against 
Calais, failed to capture it, and then discovered 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 55 

the erratic nature of his Flemish subjects, for 
they forthwith turned against him as suddenly 
as they had deserted the English alliance, and 
Philip proceeded forthwith to break their spirit, 
or rather the frantic independence of their cities. 
He succeeded, and yet Flanders prospered in 
spite of the sporadic internecine warfare. Pros- 
perity somehow came back and wealth increased, 
while Memling, the Van Eycks and their great 
line of successors, together with other masters of 
art in allied fields, gave a glory to the time that 
will endure for ever. Then followed years of strife 
and turbulence, of shifting alliances and of sym- 
pathies as ready to turn as to be aroused. Philip 
died, was succeeded by his son, Charles the Bold, 
and the disorders broke out afresh so success- 
fully that at first he was forced to give back all 
the communal privileges his father had taken 
away. In addition to his domestic troubles he 
found himself the object of the serpentine plots 
of Louis XI now King of France. Charles was 
equal to the occasion, however; he married Mar- 
garet of York, sister to the English King, so ac- 
quiring a new ally; marched against Liege, the 
centre of the local disaffection, captured it trium- 
phantly, then turned on the crafty and unscrupu- 



56 HEART OF EUROPE 

lous Louis and proceeded to beat him at his own 
game. In the midst of this enviable adventure, 
Liege revolted once more, and this time Charles, 
dragging Louis at his heels, captured the city 
again, now showing none of the mercy he had be- 
fore exhibited. The whole city was sacked, only 
the churches and monasteries being spared, and 
the ruins were given to the flames. In spite of 
the exemption accorded religious property, the 
destruction of the great city was too manifestly 
a violation of the common decencies of Christian 
conduct to be neutrally endured by the Pope, who 
at that time (it was almost five centuries ago) 
did not fear to take a strong stand for righteous- 
ness when occasion offered, and Charles had to 
make his peace with the head of the Church as 
best he could. 

The policy of "f rightfulness" had its advan- 
tages to its perpetrator, however, and the other 
rebellious cities surrendered at discretion, losing 
their treasured liberties and becoming simply 
communities in a united and centralised state. 
In the end Charles lost, for Louis XI was a schemer 
of such profound duplicity that only the devil 
himself could have matched him in the long run, 
and on even terms. The duke met failure at 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 57 

every turn: in his effort to co-ordinate his unruly- 
provinces into a working organism, in his ambi- 
tion to become King of Burgundy instead of 
duke, in his last war against the Swiss when he 
was utterly defeated and slain. He was suc- 
ceeded by his daughter, the famous Mary of 
Burgundy, who also became a victim of the royal 
spider of France, but countered on him by sud- 
denly marrying Maximilian, son of the Emperor, 
and so beginning that train of events that sev- 
ered Burgundy from its French associations and 
brought its several parts into a relationship with 
Germany that continued for nearly three centuries. 

Young, beautiful, clever, and immensely pop- 
ular, Mary of Burgundy seemed destined to ac- 
complish what her father had failed to bring 
about, the unification and restoration of a great 
Burgundian state, but after only five years of 
rule she was killed by a fall from her horse while 
hunting, and Philip, her infant son, became duke 
in name, and the old political troubles rose to a 
climax that in the end brought in the Spanish 
dominion and the ruin that followed in its wake. 

The cities of Flanders and Brabant turned 
again to France, in a frantic effort to regain their 
lost liberties, while Maximilian, who had been 



58 HEART OF EUROPE 

crowned King of Rome, and was of course next 
in succession to the Empire, fought again and 
again to restore his supremacy, and regain his 
infant son, the future Philip the Fair, who had 
been sent to France to be educated and to get 
him out of the hands of his father. In the end 
he defeated the ring-leading cities, Ghent, Bruges, 
and Ypres, and was acknowledged regent. In 
1493 Frederick died and Maximilian succeeded 
him as Emperor, proclaiming Philip as Count of 
Flanders, marrying him out of hand to Joanna, 
Infanta of Castile, and betrothing his sister to 
Don John, heir to the crown of Spain. The sud- 
den rise of a great new power in the Iberian 
Peninsula had overturned all the old alignments; 
the driving of the Moors from Spain and the 
union of Aragon and Castile in Ferdinand and 
Isabella had revealed a new force that might be 
used against France, and more dependable than 
England, and the new Emperor was not slow to 
recognise his opportunity. His sister never mar- 
ried Don John, who died before the projected 
wedding, and was followed by his sister, the 
Queen of Portugal, so suddenly the Count of 
Flanders and his countess became heirs to the 
throne of Spain. They gained little advantage 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 59 

from this, although after the death of Queen 
Isabella in 1505 they went to Spain, and were 
proclaimed as king and queen, but their glory 
was short-lived, for in the following year Philip 
met a sudden and untimely end, his queen went 
mad through grief, and the Emperor became the 
dominating influence in Spain as well as in Flan- 
ders through the guardianship of his five-year-old 
grandson, the future Charles V. 

During his minority his aunt, Margaret of 
Austria, had acted as regent, and with a wisdom 
and a benevolence her male predecessors had 
never shown, so that when in 1515 Charles be- 
came actual ruler of Flanders, he found himself 
in possession of a calm and contented commu- 
nity. Carefully educated by his admirable aunt, 
Charles, the heir to seventeen kingdoms, could 
speak the language of each, and he had, moreover, 
the enormous advantage of being tutored by the 
great Erasmus of Rotterdam. Hardly had he be- 
come King of Spain through the death of Fer- 
dinand, when his grandfather died, and he became 
Emperor as well. Practically all Europe, and 
America also, were his, and after his war with 
France which ended at Pavia with the capture 
of Francis I (when all was "lost save honour"), 



60 HEART OF EUROPE 

he was the temporal Lord of the World, except 
England alone, while the spiritual power of the 
Papacy was his only rival on the Continent, and 
the Pope himself was his old tutor, Adrian, Arch- 
bishop of Toledo. 

Charles was as able as he was universal in his 
sovereignty; he organised his vast empire on 
practical lines under well-chosen regents, none 
of whom was more excellent than Margaret of 
Austria, under whom the country prospered ex- 
ceedingly. She was as shrewd and far-seeing as 
she was admirable in character; a poet in her 
own right, she fostered art, letters, and general 
culture, and her death in 1530 was a loss to Flan- 
ders and also to the Emperor, who immediately 
appointed his sister Mary regent in her place, a 
lady of less distinguished abilities, but a good and 
faithful servant for a quarter of a century. 

Charles V estimated Luther, and the Reforma- 
tion generally, at something of their true value; 
he saw the menace as well as the merit of the bud- 
ding revolution and opposed it firmly because of 
its dangerous elements, which were already re- 
vealing themselves. The great era of the Middle 
Ages had come to an end, carrying with it in its 
fall many of those elements of righteousness in 



FLANDERS AND BRABANT 61 

thought and action for which Charles cared al- 
most passionately. He was of the older age 
rather than of the new, and in the end the con- 
viction that he had failed to stem the tide, coupled 
with the progressive ruin of the old religion, the 
old philosophy, the old order of life, led him to 
abdicate what was almost the throne of the 
world and seek refuge in a monastery, where he 
devoted the brief remainder of his life to prayer, 
meditation, and the making of watches. 

In the meantime, however, he had done Eu- 
rope inestimable services, amongst them the beat- 
ing back of the Moslem host, the recovery to 
Christianity of Hungary, the conquest of Tunis, 
and the general blocking of the double lines of 
Mohammedan advance. He was successful in 
his new crusade against the Eastern infidels, but 
he could not arrest the progress of heresy and 
anarchy in the West, and he finally abandoned 
the fight in despair, turning over to others a 
royalty too heavy to be borne. To his son Philip 
were given Spain, the American possessions, and 
the "Low Countries," which then comprised all 
Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg as well as Ar- 
tois and Cambrai. So began the Spanish do- 
minion over the very centre of the Heart of Eu- 



62 HEART OF EUROPE 

rope. It was the richest state in the world; when 
Philip II became sovereign there were seventeen 
provinces with 208 great walled towns, 150 bor- 
oughs and more than 6,000 villages. The prod- 
ucts were infinitely varied and were famous 
throughout the world: woollen cloth, linen, silk, 
velvet, damask, embroideries, gloves, metal-work 
of every kind. Antwerp was in the lead in com- 
merce, and it is said that the city had a popula- 
tion of 250,000, with 1,000 resident foreign mer- 
chants; 500 ships entered the port daily, and 300 
wagons from across the frontiers of France and 
the Empire, while more business was transacted 
there in a week than in two years in Venice, her 
great commercial rival in the South. Such were 
the lands that came to Philip of Spain: the 
richest prize that Europe could afford. 



IV 

A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 

WHEN Philip II came to the throne there 
was a new king in France, Henry II, who 
forthwith broke the peace Charles V had en- 
gineered, and proceeded to invade both Italy 
and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in the 
north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so 
disastrous a fashion that hardly any one but 
Nevers and Conde escaped. It was in gratitude 
for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that 
Philip built the palace of the Escorial. Trying 
again the next year, Henry did indeed, through 
the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than 
that which followed him when he met Alva the 
year before in Italy), regain Calais, during the 
absence of the English garrison, who were home 
on a holiday; but again Egmont came into the 
breech, crushed the French at Gravelines, and 
so forced the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, which 
obliged France, amongst other penalties, to give 
up to Philip more than two hundred walled 

63 



64 HEART OF EUROPE 

towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, 
Mary of England now being dead. 

Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained 
and most effective army in Europe, had won the 
war for Philip, but out of the victory came in 
the end the ruin of their country, for before leav- 
ing for Spain, which he loved, he demanded of 
the Netherlands, which he disliked, three million 
florins toward the expense of the war. This was 
granted, but coupled with a request that the 
Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It happened 
that this demand was made at the instigation of 
William, Prince of Orange, who now appears on 
the scene, for he had discovered that Henry and 
Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protes- 
tantism in the Low Countries by introducing the 
Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien garrison 
was to be the means of putting this plan into 
effect. William of Orange was not a Fleming 
but a German; he had expected to be made 
regent when the King went back to Spain, and 
had been disappointed. He was neither a Catholic 
nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing 
politician of extremely rationalistic views. He 
knew that the spirit of independence in the 
Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 65 

and Protestants alike could be allied against 
both the Inquisition and a foreign garrison. He 
cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the 
last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of 
Philip, and so precipitated the conflict that raged 
for almost a century to the ruin and misery of 
all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to 
yield, went back to Spain, and at once began his 
scheming for the destruction of the Protestant 
heresy in his too-independent territories. 

So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and 
the cultivated classes were concerned, Protes- 
tantism had made little if any headway in spite 
of the wide corruption of the Church, but among 
the peasants and the ignorant, particularly in 
the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To Philip 
it was both a damnable heresy and a civil men- 
ace; he hated it as his father had hated it, but 
Charles V was of a different mould and temper. 
Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at 
that time) lay all the difference. To him with 
his cold mind and pitiless temper there was only 
one question: how to root out this accursed and 
poisonous growth. The answer was at hand in 
the shape of the peculiar type of inquisition which 
had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose 



66 HEART OF EUROPE 

of completing the expulsion of the Moors and 
Jews from the Peninsula after the final defeat of 
the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its 
efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never 
been used against Christian heretics, Philip felt 
(as others have felt after him) that both the 
righteous State and the Catholic Church were, 
through the King, fighting for their lives, and 
that he had no right to balk at any means that 
offered when it was a question of life or death. 

The old "Papal" Inquisition, which came into 
existence toward the end of the Middle Ages, 
and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of 
the Renaissance with which it synchronised, was 
legitimate enough, if you hold, as every one held 
then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as material 
evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. 
Trials were conducted according to civil law, 
they were public, and the secular arm alone in- 
flicted punishment. The "Spanish" Inquisition, 
which is the form so bitterly condemned to-day, 
was a creature of the Renaissance in its fulness. 
It was an engine of the most diabolical effi- 
ciency, for its proceedings were secret, its finding 
irrevocable, its penalties merciless and as cruel as 
English criminal law in the seventeenth and 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 67 

eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of 
the refinements of torture that were first de- 
veloped under "Good King Hal" when he was 
waging his war against the monks and monas- 
teries of his own England. 

Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the 
Middle Ages, he could never have imposed the 
Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those 
of the Renaissance were as different as possible, 
and he had no trouble in gaining their consent. 
A few burnings took place, and then the loyal 
and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took 
matters into their own hands and through the 
regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that 
unless the thing was stopped the provinces would 
act in defence of their own rights and in accor- 
dance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges. 
The Protestant mob also began to act after its 
own fashion, without waiting for an answer from 
Philip, and week after week carried on a course 
of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monas- 
teries, churches, and destroyed more old stained 
glass, wonderful statues, great pictures, jewelled 
vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped 
to this day. The senseless and sacrilegious fury 
of this mob of the baser sort not only lashed the 



68 HEART OF EUROPE 

King into a cold fury but it even halted some of 
the Catholic nobles, many of whom, including 
Egmont himself, began to wonder if, after all, the 
Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the 
revelations that were being made in the dese- 
crated churches of Antwerp and Ghent and Tour- 
nai. No advantage was taken of this changing 
sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip 
struck, and the Duke of Alva, with an army of 
10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, oc- 
cupied Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, in- 
cluding even those like Egmont and Horn, who 
were both loyal and devout Catholics (but bar- 
ring Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Ger- 
many), and established the "Council of Blood," 
which during the first week of its activities exe- 
cuted more than eight hundred men whose only 
crime was protesting against the denial of their 
guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of the 
Inquisition. 

The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a 
small armed force for the deliverance of the 
cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first 
victory over Alva's forces was answered by im- 
mediate reprisals in Brussels, a score of nobles 
being sent to the block, including Horn and Eg- 




From a photograph by Hanfstaengl 

THE DUKE OF ALVA, MORO VAN DASHORST 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 69 

mont, the latter being the most honoured of the 
nobles and as good a Catholic as he was a soldier. 
The people remained absolutely crushed, mak- 
ing no effort to rise in support of the Prince of 
Orange, who, defeated by Alva, sought the aid of 
the French Protestants, attacked from the sea by 
means of privateers who preyed on Spanish com- 
merce, and finally, by establishing a base in Hol- 
land, raised this portion of the Spanish Nether- 
lands against Alva and made himself actual head 
of a new state. In the meantime a Huguenot 
army had laid siege to Mons, but just as victory 
seemed near the Massacre of St. Bartholomew 
ended the Protestant party in France for ever, de- 
stroyed all the hopes that had been raised through 
the possibility of assistance from Coligny, and 
sent Orange back again behind the Rhine, leav- 
ing Flanders and Brabant to their fate. Alva 
saw to it that this was sufficiently awful, and then 
began operations against Holland, but by this 
time Philip had become thoroughly tired of the 
costly war and listened willingly to the enemies 
of the terrible duke, recalled him, and sent in his 
place the comparatively mild and accommodating 
Requesens. 

The tale is now one of progressive and finally 



70 HEART OF EUROPE 

successful efforts at pacifying the country, the 
undoing so far as possible of the bloody work of 
Alva, the winning back to the Church and to 
the Spanish crown of all those who had not gone 
over definitely to Protestantism and the Prince 
of Orange. Both the Pope and the King offered 
full amnesty, and the southern provinces, those, 
that is, that now form the kingdom of Belgium, 
accepted at once and completely, for after all 
they were solidly Catholic and in principle not 
averse to Spanish dominion. The northern prov- 
inces — i. e. 9 Holland — rejected all overtures, bind- 
ing themselves completely, implacably, and sav- 
agely to Protestantism, and from now on the 
former Spanish Netherlands became two states: 
Holland, soon to win its independence, and Bel- 
gium, now and for a long time to come, a Spanish 
province. 

Order was still far away. It was in the year 
1573 that Requesens came to reverse the policy 
of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 
1715, when Spanish rule was finally terminated, 
that there was any rest or relief for the tortured 
and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant. 
Requesens died ; the Spanish troops mutinied, were 
joined by the German mercenaries, and began a 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 71 

war on their own account, burning and sacking 
Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, 
and harrying the country right and left. Then 
came Don John of Austria, Philip's new governor- 
general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of 
the pages of mediaeval romance. He came too 
late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the saddle, riding 
rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe. 
Abandoning his original policy of pacification, 
he turned to war and was successful, but only to 
find about every power in Europe represented in 
the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Ant- 
werp as his headquarters, the provincial represent- 
atives, with Brussels as their centre, were howling 
for help from any source; the Protestant faction 
called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their as- 
sistance, while the Catholics appealed to the Duke 
d'Alengon, and both put in an appearance, the lat- 
ter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the 
interior, while the former defeated Don John in 
a pitched battle and drove him back to Namur, 
where in a few months he died of chagrin and a 
broken heart, after making his nephew Alexander 
Farnese, Prince of Parma, his successor in the 
field. 

Hell is the only name that can be applied to 



72 HEART OF EUROPE 

the unhappy land, the condition of which was not 
unlike that of Mexico in this year of enlighten- 
ment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reforma- 
tion together had extinguished both civilisation 
and culture over the greater part of Europe; 
war was everywhere and incessant, all princi- 
ple had been abandoned and the ethical stand- 
ards of society had disappeared. Slaughter, civil 
war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled 
through an ever-widening desolation and the end 
of the world seemed at hand. Fortunately, in 
a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants 
served as an impulse to union; their savagery in 
Ghent and Brussels somehow pulled the people 
of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win 
some small order out of the insane chaos. He 
began a new campaign, drove out the French, 
laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last 
(the Prince of Orange having been assassinated 
at the instigation of Philip) broke down the last 
Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp 
and for the moment restored peace over a de- 
serted, ruined, and blood-stained land. And then 
Philip II died and dying abandoned the coun- 
try he had received as the richest in Europe and 
left as the most miserable and poverty-stricken, 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 73 

handing it over to new rulers in the persons of 
his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Arch- 
duke Albert of Austria. 

The great and happy and wealthy state created 
by the House of Burgundy had been utterly de- 
stroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protes- 
tant state had been formed from one fragment 
in the north, other portions were shortly to be 
incorporated in France, and the nine provinces 
that still remained out of the original seventeen 
weJre hardly more than a geographical abstrac- 
tion. Half the great cities had been sacked and 
burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaugh- 
tered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders 
had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) 
the vast commerce that once was the possession 
of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, 
famine was universal, religion and mercy and 
education were memories, while the old civic 
spirit and the old freedom and independence were 
things of so long ago they were not even re- 
membered. 

To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant 
well by the exhausted country, but first of all 
they had set their hearts on the crushing of the 
Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war 



74 HEART OF EUROPE 

set in which ended at last with the complete 
victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowl- 
edged independence. Then came the anomaly of 
twelve years of peace with the astonishing out- 
burst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent 
culture. Peace is a good foundation for indus- 
try, trade, and commerce, but the fact is un- 
avoidable that the black ploughing and the red 
fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a 
luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have 
issue in character as they follow from it. Here 
in Flanders the years between the Peace of Ant- 
werp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule 
on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent 
with all manner of civic and personal wealth in 
those lines that are cultural rather than material. 
It was a time of the restoration of religion through 
new monastic foundations, of the establishing of 
houses of mercy, of the building up of great uni- 
versities, of the development of printing, of the 
production of great scientists and scholars, of a 
new era of painting. The University of Louvain 
dates from this time, the great printing-house of 
the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens 
and Vandyck. 

It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 75 

Spain took charge once more, the Dutch con- 
tinued their policy of commercial and religious 
aggression, the Thirty Years' War drew the un- 
fortunate provinces into its whirlpool; the war 
between France and Spain was largely fought 
on their territory, the war of France against the 
United Netherlands resulted in the seizure by 
the unsuccessful party — France — of Belgian ter- 
ritory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year 
after year Belgium was subject to renewed dev- 
astations; what the Protestants and Spaniards 
had left the French despoiled. Brussels, which 
had now become the richest and most splendid 
of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot can- 
non balls and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen 
churches and four thousand houses being burned, 
and the great city deprived of almost its last ex- 
amples of the great art of the Middle Ages. 

And so the wretched tale goes on, generation 
after generation. God alone knows how or why 
anything was left in Belgium, either of art or 
culture or character or religion, or even of the 
rudiments of civilisation. Still something did 
remain for destruction, as was proved a little later 
by the revolutionists of France and recently by 
the Prussians, both of whom have performed the 



76 HEART OF EUROPE 

final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe 
had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hun- 
dred and sixty years, and yet somehow it con- 
tinued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a 
great congeries of Christian peoples, product of 
the splendid centuries from 1000 to 1500 A. D., 
had been destroyed and superseded by the very 
different force engendered by Renaissance and 
Reformation. If there are those who still, de- 
spite the blazing enlightenment of the last twelve- 
month, retain any illusions as to the compar- 
ative beneficence of the two epochs, it would be 
well for them to consider in detail the annals and 
the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of 
Europe during the five centuries of medievalism, 
and the same during the five centuries of the 
Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast 
is striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, 
the lesson, immediately to be applied in the pres- 
ent crisis, pregnant of possible benefits. 

With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Bel- 
gium passed to the Emperor Charles VI, and Aus- 
trian dominion began. In contrast to the pre- 
ceding horrors it was comparatively uneventful; 
while Prince Charles of Lorraine was governor 
the country was quiet and prosperous and a cer- 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 77 

tain advance occurred on cultural lines. This en- 
lightened prince deserves well of history in one 
respect .at least, for, by an imperial decree he 
caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that 
a gentleman did not lose his status as such if he 
indulged in the practice of the arts or letters ! 
Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic re- 
former of laudable intentions, who set himself to 
the perfecting of everything, both religious and 
secular, to the extreme irritation of his people 
who simply wanted to govern themselves and 
apparently cared little whether this were well 
done or ill. In the end the whole country broke 
up again in rebellion and disorder, the nobles 
leagued in one group under the Duke d'Arenberg, 
the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and 
noisy demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. 
Somehow or other they managed to get together 
at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian 
garrisons, and drove the Emperor Joseph across 
the Meuse when he forthwith died of sheer dis- 
couragement. 

Then followed a short-lived "republic" en- 
gineered by Van der Noot, who was an adherent 
of the new French ideas, with an attack on the 
nobles which was sufficiently successful to bring 



78 HEART OF EUROPE 

their party to an end. Next, the powers who 
looked most askance at the fast-growing revolu- 
tion — England, Holland, and Prussia — united for 
the restoration of Austrian authority, on gen- 
eral principles, and the Emperor Leopold II, 
with their support, asserted, and then established 
his authority, capturing Namur and within two 
weeks occupying the whole country (which ac- 
cepted him contentedly enough), driving the am- 
bitious advocate with the revolutionary tenden- 
cies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried 
honestly enough to conciliate the country, but 
its temper and inclinations were otherwise, so 
France was asked to intervene, which she was not 
loath to do, sending Doumouriez to undertake the 
task. Badly beaten at first, he succeeded finally 
at Valmy and Jemappes, and the French Revolu- 
tion assumed control. The cabal of assassins then 
in power in Paris decreed that Belgium should be 
saved, but that first she must be purged, and a 
choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to 
Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine 
was set up at once, and clerics, nobles, and the 
wealthier merchants became its victims, while 
the patriot army, supported by the local revolu- 
tionists, acted after their kind and sacked the 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 79 

remaining churches, destroyed religious houses, 
and generally plundered whatever they safely 
could, i. e. y whatever was unable to defend itself. 
Doumouriez countenanced none of this, but he 
was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for 
the cabal in Paris though with the idea always 
before him that if he could control Belgium and 
conquer Holland he would be in a good position 
from which to turn on his employers, crush them, 
and then restore the monarchy on constitutional 
lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was de- 
feated by the allies and again Austria won back 
her insecure provinces. She was received with 
the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic 
with the shattered Belgian character, but after 
a few months was driven out for the last time 
when France was finally victorious over the half- 
hearted, selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of 
whom, England, was waging war against the re- 
public with anything approaching sincerity and 
determination. 

Again the French — or rather the republican 
faction — entered into possession, and unhappy 
Belgium felt the full force of its grinning hypoc- 
risy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous 
greed. "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" was 



80 HEART OF EUROPE 

painted on the walls, and simultaneously the coun- 
try was robbed of its last coins, its laws and 
privileges were overthrown, its citizens deprived 
of even the most fundamental rights of liberty 
and property, while the few remaining abbeys 
and castles were sacked, burned, and their ruins 
razed to the ground. Alva had been an amateur 
compared with the new apostles of liberty, and 
when at last Belgium was declared regenerate 
and was incorporated in the French "republic," 
nothing remained for incorporation except a 
name, a memory, and a huddle of entirely ruined 
and perfectly hopeless victims of four centuries 
of cumulative enlightenment and progress. 

Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups 
of desperate men took to the forests and moors, 
robbing, killing, existing as best they could, and 
of course they were crushed again and again; at 
last, however, Bonaparte began to bring some 
order out of the republican anarchy, and condi- 
tions improved. When at last he proclaimed 
himself Emperor the Belgians accepted him with 
the same avidity they always had shown for any 
man who promised some alleviation of their in- 
tolerable sufferings. Holland was occupied and 
given a king of its own, Napoleon's brother Louis, 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 81 

who was not only the strongest and finest char- 
acter in the family, but so righteous in his king- 
ship and so whole-heartedly devoted to his Dutch 
that he soon alienated the sympathies of his im- 
perial brother while failing to gain those of his 
somewhat difficult subjects. 

The dream empire began to dissolve; Holland 
revolted, and the Prince of Orange was restored; 
Belgium was occupied by the Allies, who had got 
to work again, and the scheme of a new state, to 
be formed of all the old seventeen provinces 
united under the Prince of Orange, was brought 
forward against the wishes of the Belgians, who 
preferred the restoration of Austrian rule. They 
had lived too close to their Protestant Dutch 
neighbours and had too keen a memory of their 
character and habits to desire amalgamation with 
them on any terms. 

Napoleon went to Elba, came back, called on 
his "loyal Belgians" to support him, advanced 
into their territories, and at Waterloo lost every- 
thing and melted away into history and legend, 
leaving Belgium in unnatural union with the 
Dutch provinces, where it remained for some 
fifteen years, revolting in 1830, making good its 
rebellion, and establishing itself as an indepen- 



82 HEART OF EUROPE 

dent state under the sovereignty of Prince Leo- 
pold of Saxe-Cobourg, who had been elected 
King on the refusal of the Due de Nemours, first 
chosen by the victorious provisional government. 
The long agony was at an end; it had lasted 
from August 22, 1567, when the Duke of Alva 
entered Brussels, until July 21, 1831, when Leo- 
pold I was crowned King of Belgium, a period of 
two hundred and sixty-four years. Other peoples 
and other states have been brought low, time out 
of mind; have suffered, disintegrated, and disap- 
peared. It would be hard to find another in- 
stance, however, where so fabulously rich a peo- 
ple, and so cultivated withal, so supreme in their 
achievement of a lofty and well-rounded civilisa- 
tion, have been called upon to submit to so pro- 
longed, varied, and searching an assault, to descend 
to such depths of misery, poverty, and degradation 
— and who yet have preserved through two cen- 
turies and a half of agony and spoliation a tradi- 
tion and a habit of righteousness that, when the 
great test arrived, blazed upward in sudden fierce- 
ness of self-revelation to the confusion of new 
enemies and the wonder of a world. What lies 
beyond awaits the proof, but for the moment three 
centuries have dropped away and the old inde- 



A SPANISH NETHERLANDS 83 

pendence, the old fearlessness, the old honour of 
Bruges and Ghent, of Liege and Malines shine 
again on old battle-fields of new carnage and in 
new hearts of old righteousness. The new era be- 
gins, and the world waits, confident of the issue. 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 

BETWEEN Paris and Cologne, Strasbourg 
and Bruges lies, in little, nearly the whole 
history of northern architecture from Charle- 
magne to the last Louis of France, when it ceased 
to be an art and became a fashion. The greater 
part of Normandy lies, it is true, across the Seine, 
and is, for the time, beyond our field of vision, 
but, barring Caen, architectural significance is 
well concentrated in the triangle, Rouen, Dieppe, 
le Havre. The same is true of the old Royaume 
of France; though Chartres and Bourges lie to 
the south, the beginning, and in some sense the 
culmination, of Gothic is to be found between 
Seine and Somme. In the east, to the Rhine, we 
have practically all that Germany has contrib- 
uted, except in the later days of the Renaissance. 
If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and 
mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Treves 
old Roman ruins that take us back four or five 
centuries earlier, but the real history of this region 
begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his fa- 

84 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 85 

vourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but 
vastly significant, building left us as evidence of 
his inspiration and his creative power. With the 
ending of this day-dream there comes a great 
silence, while civilisation and culture disappear 
again, to be restored two centuries later, far to 
the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here 
we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fecamp, and 
the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumieges. 
For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, 
Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of 
pure and consistent type; Chalons, Amiens, and 
Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, 
Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sump- 
tuous decline. 

From the other hand we go on from Aix to 
Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that 
took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that 
followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, 
with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, 
which also are beyond our survey. A century 
later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Treves, 
Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high 
Gothic of the noon of medievalism is found at 
Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fan- 
tasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 



86 HEART OF EUROPE 

turies, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in 
Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, 
and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, 
and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, 
chateaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition 
at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, 
well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored 
classic of Nancy. 

As there is no other country in the north, of 
equal area, where history has been made so 
plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is 
with its art, and its architecture in particular, 
which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and 
the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian 
civilisation in the West — Carolingian, Norman, 
and Gothic — and through monuments singularly 
significant and equally notable in their perfection. 
It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; 
there are a hundred at least, each of which de- 
mands (and many have received) a volume or 
more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, 
either for history or beauty, in a farewell that 
may be final for all, as already it is for such con- 
summate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth 
Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims. 

Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian 




JUMIEGES 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 87 

frontier, the "City of the Great King," where 
culture lightened again after the long night, and 
where, of all the churches and palaces of the 
Emperor, only one remains as evidence of what 
he did. The royal chapel has been built onto and 
over and around, but the original norm remains 
in the shape of that polygonal form with sur- 
rounding arcades that was a step in the develop- 
ment of the perfect Gothic chevet. To a great 
extent it is a replica of San Vitale in Ravenna, 
and may very well have been built by the descen- 
dants of those Roman craftsmen who, after the 
fall of the one-time capitol of the world, sought 
refuge either under Byzantine protection in Ra- 
venna or on Lake Como, where the tradition is 
they carefully cherished the traditions and the 
esoteric mysteries of their art, perpetuating the 
slowly fading memory through secret lodges that, 
some held, were the progenitors of modern free- 
masonry. 

When the possibilities of a new culture and a 
restored civilisation revealed themselves to the 
conqueror, who was also statesman, patriot, and 
(after his dim and flickering light) Christian, two 
centuries had left the West a wilderness, and all 
was to do over again. There were, it seemed, 



88 HEART OF EUROPE 

neither scholars nor artists nor righteous leaders 
of any sort in the world, and the task must have 
appeared hopeless. Charlemagne, undaunted, sent 
east and west, from Britain to Spain, searching 
out those who, by report, rose above the hopeless 
level of barbarian mediocrity. Alcuin of Britain, 
Peter of Pisa, Theodulphus, Hincmar, Eriugena, 
Radbertus Maurus, gathered around him at Aix, 
forming a cultural centre, reforming the Church, 
building up schools, creating an art almost out 
of nothing. 

There was little enough , though Rome had its 
basilicas of the time of Constantine — San Paolo, 
San Lorenzo, Santa Maria Maggiore; from the 
East, it is true, travellers brought back wondering 
stories of the splendour of Justinian's churches, 
with Hagia Sophia at the head; in Ravenna were 
the more modest monuments of the Exarchate — 
Sant' Apollinare in Classe, San Vitale — in Istria, 
at Parenzo and Grado, were churches showing 
some new elements probably provided by Lom- 
bard builders, and San Pietro, Toscanella stood 
like a miracle, novel, without forebears, a new 
version of an ancient theme. These are what we 
have left, and then there was more, for much has 
since been destroyed, but most of it lay far afield, 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 89 

and in the north there was nothing. The work 
of co-ordination was well performed, however, 
and the succession was re-established; after the 
chapel at Aix, therefore, architectural develop- 
ment was continuous, if moderate, though any 
estimate must be dubious owing to the almost 
complete destruction of the monuments. We still 
have the apses of Sant' Ambrogio in Milan; San 
Donato, Zara, N. D. de la Couture of Le Mans, 
and Montier en Der, none of them particularly 
inspiring or inspired, and none with any hint of 
what was suddenly to happen at Jumieges in 
the eleventh century. That the latter building 
may not have been as amazing an innovation as 
it appears is indicated by fragments and foun- 
dations of the work that came between it and 
Charlemagne, as at St. Martin of Tours, where 
the Revolution has left us nothing but foundations 
indicative of a former superstructure that may 
well have been the connecting-link, and might 
have changed our entire estimate of the quality 
of the architecture of the second Dark Ages. As 
it is, this chapel at Aix stands not only first in 
the great recovery of the eighth century, but 
almost unique, with no successors for nearly three 
centuries. 



90 HEART OF EUROPE 

When the true dawn begins to lighten the hills, 
it is in the west that its coming is foreshown, in 
that Duchy of Normandy, where in a century 
the fierce Vikings, who had been driven from the 
coast of Flanders in their forays from the Baltic, 
had become the finely tempered material out of 
which was to be forged, by the monks of Cluny, 
a Catholic civilisation that was to extend itself 
over all western Europe and endure for five cen- 
turies. Of the three great abbeys that were the 
centres from which radiated the great trans- 
forming force, Bee, Fecamp, and Jumieges, the 
two latter lie on our side of the Seine, with the 
third only ten miles on the other side, while St. 
Georges de Bocherville, intact except for its 
pestilential restoration, is of the same period, as 
is Cerisy le Foret. Caen, with its two abbeys of 
the Conqueror, inestimable monuments of archi- 
tectural history, is well to the west, with Evreux, 
Lisieux, Bayeux, and Mont St. Michel, but we 
have enough on the right bank to demonstrate 
the nature and the greatness of the work ac- 
complished by Cluny and the Normans in a 
union cemented by a vital and crescent Chris- 
tianity. 

Jumieges stands first, in its forgotten loop of 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 91 

the Seine, and is amazing, no less. But for its 
fine new fourteenth-century chevet, it was, at 
the time of the French Revolution, almost in its 
original state, but it was destroyed then, with 
Cluny, Avranches, St. Martin of Tours, and 
other priceless monuments, though by no means 
so completely. To-day its towering walls, rising 
above thick trees and greenery, are startlingly 
picturesque, but their great value lies in the 
revelation they make of what was possible in the 
earliest days of Christian recovery. The work 
was begun in 1040 and finished within twenty- 
five years, being followed immediately by the 
abbeys of Caen, as these were followed by St. 
Georges de Bocherville. The original plan was 
in each case about the same, the standard type, 
originally Latin, with Syrian, and probably Lom- 
bard and Carolingian, developments; cruciform, 
aisled both in nave and choir, the latter being of 
two bays only, with an apse, but no apsidal aisle 
and chapels as at Tours. The transepts are of two 
bays on either side the central tower, the end bays 
having galleries or tribunes, with a subordinate apse 
to the east, so forming, in the lower stage, small, 
low chapels. It is in the working upward from 
this plan that the significant developments ap- 



92 HEART OF EUROPE 

pear, and both here and at Cerisy le Foret, we 
find the order of round-arched arcade, high tri- 
forium of two arches under a containing arch, 
and a single clerestory window, Cerisy having 
as well an open clerestory arcade of three units. 
The system is clearly alternating, as in Lombardy 
and Tuscany, but there is no evidence that vault- 
ing was ever contemplated; instead, I think it 
certain that great transverse arches on every 
other pier, supporting a wooden roof, were in 
mind, after the Syrian fashion, as it was later 
modified at San Miniato in Florence, a few years 
before, though these were certainly never built at 
Jumieges. The west front, with its tall, flanking 
towers, is of the Como type (query: Is the hand 
of the Comacine master visible here?), while all 
the vertical proportions are more lofty and aspir- 
ing than had ever been known before. As a matter 
of fact, given the chevet with its aisle and radiat- 
ing chapels, which was already being worked out 
farther south by the simple process of halving 
the Syrian, Byzantine, Ravennesque, and Caro- 
lingian polygonal church and attaching this to 
the simultaneously developed nave, and you have 
all the potency of the Gothic system, the high 
vault (sexpartite or quadripartite) with its flying 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 93 

buttresses now to be worked out at Caen, giving 
the final structural element, while the expanding 
Catholic faith and the buoyant northern blood 
were woven together to have issue in that es- 
sentially mediaeval character which was to trans- 
form the whole, infusing it with that peculiar 
spiritual quality which gave its distinctive char- 
acter, through a new vision of beauty, to the art 
that had been evolved for the full expression of 
a Christian civilisation at last triumphant and 
supreme over a dead paganism. 

After Cluny and Jumieges, Paris, Bourges, 
Chartres, and Reims are inevitable, and the work- 
ing out of a great destiny is headlong and almost 
incredible. Jumieges was finished in 1066, the 
year of the Norman conquest of England; Reims 
was begun in 1212. Within a space of a century 
and a half the greatest architectural evolution in 
history had taken place, so echoing and voicing 
an equally unprecedented development in human 
character and culture. In 1066, hardly more 
than fifty years had passed since Christian so- 
ciety emerged from two centuries of barbarism; 
in 1212 it had mounted to the loftiest levels of 
human achievement, with a theology, a philos- 
ophy, and an art, whatever its form, with which 



94 HEART OF EUROPE 

there had been nothing comparable in the past, 
with which the achievements that were to follow, 
as they now show themselves in the red light of 
a revealing war, seem only the insane wanderings 
of a disorganised horde. 

The sequence of development is well worked 
out east of the Seine, and at the hands of the 
Franks of the "Royaume," now under the direc- 
tion of the Cistercians, as a century before the 
Normans had been controlled by the Cluniacs. 
This constant revivification of monasticism during 
crescent periods of human growth is a very in- 
teresting phenomenon. Apparently monasticism, 
which has accompanied Christianity from its 
earliest beginning until to-day, is an essential por- 
tion of its working structure, and if you accept 
Christianity in fact, you cannot escape accepting 
the "religious life" in principle. It seems, how- 
ever, that it is always in unstable equilibrium, 
prone to inevitable decadence, and no order lasts 
out three generations without losing its benefi- 
cent energy. When life is on its periodic upward 
curve, a reformation always occurs at the critical 
moment, and there is no loss of impetus; so the 
original Benedictinism which had served Charle- 
magne so well, but had sunk into worse than in- 
action, gave place in the eleventh century to the 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 95 

great Cluniac reform, which in its turn was suc- 
ceeded by the Cistercian reform, as this yielded 
after another hundred years to the reform of St. 
Dominic and St. Francis. 

Now the Romanesque art of Toulouse, Aqui- 
taine, and Burgundy, the Norman of Normandy 
and England, the Rhenish of Germany, were 
largely Benedictine of the Cluniac mode, and 
the style rapidly became inordinately sumptuous, 
costly, and magnificent, as at Aries, Toulouse, Poi- 
tiers, Glastonbury, Durham. It has been said of 
monastic movements: "First generation pious, sec- 
ond generation learned, third generation decadent." 
Certainly as the Benedictines in France went on 
to the twelfth century, their original austerity and 
fervour were relaxed, and their art became a thing 
of splendour as their wealth and learning and 
temporal power increased. The Cistercian move- 
ment of Robert of Molesme and Stephen Harding 
and Bernard of Clairvaux was a revolt against 
luxury and laxity, an attempt (as ever) to get 
back to the supposititious simplicity of earlier 
times, and in the success that followed architec- 
ture changed completely, though the ending of 
the new style, and even its consummation, were 
different indeed from what the Cistercian re- 
forms had desired. 



96 HEART OF EUROPE 

In its beginnings Gothic architecture was an 
attempt at economy, the trying for something 
less massive and ornate than the great Benedictine 
piles of inert masonry. By cleverly developing 
a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of 
masonry was reduced by half, while attention 
was drawn away from the fast-increasing orna- 
mentation to the shell itself, whereby a great 
gain was effected, and architecture became once 
more a study in organism, in composition, and 
in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection 
of exquisite organism, almost living in its con- 
summate integrity and its sensitive interplay of 
forces. This perfectly co-ordinated structure is, 
of course, infused and transfigured by an intense 
sense of beauty, quite new in its forms, and given 
a spiritual and symbolical content peculiar to 
itself, the result being what, for want of a better 
term, we call Gothic. The two elements cannot 
be disassociated, as pedants feign, for, like all 
great art, it is in a sense sacramental, and the 
"outward and visible sign" may never be sepa- 
rated from the "inward and spiritual grace."* 

* " Sacramentum est corporate vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter 
propositum ex similitudine repraesentans, et ex institutione significans et 
ex sanctificatione continens, aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam." 
— (Hugo de St. Victoire.) 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 97 

Both processes may be followed through the 
great sequence of churches between the Seine, 
the Marne, and the Somme — or might have been 
a year ago. To-day it is safe to postulate nothing 
of a dim and ominous future; we know that much 
of this galaxy has been destroyed after seven 
centuries of careful cherishing through innumer- 
able wars and revolutions. That all may go is 
possible, as the power that brought them into 
existence has gone, though in this case only for 
a time. Once, however, the great and triumphal 
progress from Jumieges through Noyon, Senlis, 
St. Denis, Laon, Paris, Amiens, to its final achieve- 
ment at Reims, was a complete and visible record 
of the greatest and most headlong advance toward 
the real things in Christian civilisation by means 
of the real things in Christian civilisation history 
has ever recorded. Five of these — Senlis, Noyon, 
Laon, Amiens, and Reims lie either within the bat- 
tle lines that have maintained themselves so long, 
or at least within sound of the guns; one has 
been destroyed — Reims; one thus far preserved — 
Amiens. The fate of the others is in doubt, to- 
gether with that of all the lands that lie to the 
east, and the danger of irreparable loss is greater 
than ever before since the French Revolution. 



98 HEART OF EUROPE 

There was no better place than this once-lovely 
region, now hidden from view in the lurid smoke 
and the poisoned fumes of a new and demoniac 
sort of war, in which to watch the swift growth 
to a splendid self -consciousness of Gothic architec- 
ture. The elements of Gothic organism had been 
developed in the twelfth century by the great 
Cluniac-Norman alliance, but this was only a 
beginning; Gothic quality was still to be achieved, 
and this consisted largely in three elements — co- 
hesion, economy, and character. The first means 
the synthetic knitting of everything together, 
and the giving it dynamic power to develop from 
within outward; it means making structure ab- 
solutely central and comprehensive, but also 
beautiful; ornament, decoration, remaining some- 
thing added to it, something of the bene esse, 
though not of the esse; deriving from it in every 
instance, but not necessary to its perfection. The 
second is the reducing of mass to its logical and 
structural (and also optical) minimum, bringing 
into play the forces of accommodation, balance, 
and active, as opposed to passive, resistance. 
The third is the hardest to describe or determine, 
and probably can only be perceived through com- 
parison. It is the differentiation in quality, the 




LAON 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 99 

determination of personality, and it is hardly to 
be defined, though it is instantly perceived. 

In the Abbaye aux Hommes, or Cerisy, or St. 
Georges de Bocherville, we find great majesty 
and beauty, many elements that are distinctive 
of true Gothic work and persist through its entire 
course, but none of these buildings is actually 
Gothic. In St. Germer de Fly, however, and in 
Sens and Noyon, while there seems at first little 
differentiation from the others, the Gothic spirit 
has found itself and is already working rapidly 
toward its consummation. 

Of the condition of Noyon at the present time 
we know little; of what this may be in a few 
months' time we know less. The town itself was 
of the oldest, its foundation being Roman, and 
within its walls Chilperic was buried in 721, while 
Charlemagne was crowned King of the Franks 
about thirty years before he became Emperor, 
and Hugh, first of the Capetian dynasty, was here 
chosen king in 987. Incidentally, the town was 
also the birthplace of John Calvin. The ancient 
cathedral was burned in 1131 and the present 
work begun shortly after, though it is hard to 
believe that much of the existing structure ante- 
dates the year 1150. The crossing and transepts 



100 HEART OF EUROPE 

date from about 1170, the nave about ten years 
later, while the west front and towers are of the 
early part of the next century. The certainty 
and calm assurance of the work is remarkable. 
Paris, which is later, is full of tentative experi- 
ments, but there is no halting here, rather a 
serene certainty of touch that is perfectly con- 
vincing. The plan is curious in that it has tran- 
septs with apsidal ends, after the fashion of 
Rhenish Romanesque, one of the few instances in 
France. The alternating system is used through- 
out, and the vault was originally sexpartite; the 
interior order consists of a low arcade, high trifo- 
rium, triforium gallery, and a clerestory comprised 
wholly within the vault lines; round and pointed 
arches are used indiscriminately, and the flying 
buttresses are perhaps the earliest that emerged 
from the protection of the triforium roofs. In 
the choir, which is earliest in date, the ornament 
is rude, even rudimentary, though distinctly 
Gothic in form, but in the nave twenty years has 
served to change this into work of the most bril- 
liant and classical beauty. In 1293 the whole 
town was destroyed by fire, and the cathedral 
wrecked; it was immediately reconstructed, how- 
ever, and at this time the sexpartite gave place 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 101 

to quadripartite vaulting, while the west front, 
with its great towers, very noble in their propor- 
tions and their powerful buttressing, was com- 
pleted. This rebuilding and the loss of all the 
original glass has left Noyon less perfect than 
many of the neighbouring churches, but it still 
remained a grave and strikingly solemn example 
of the transition. 

Not far away, past the huge and formidable 
ruins of Coucy, the greatest castle of the Middle 
Ages, whose lords haughtily proclaimed, "Roi ne 
says, ne prince, ne due, ne comte aussi: Je suis 
le Sire de Coucy," is Laon on its sudden hill. 
How great the loss has been here we do not know, 
but the town has been frequently under German 
bombardment, and the end is not yet. Laon is 
unique, a masterly work of curious vitality, orig- 
inal, daring, and even rebellious against a growing 
tradition. In the Middle Ages it was vastly 
admired, but to us of a day more dull and timor- 
ous in architecture, because we have no art of our 
own and have found so little in life from which 
we could draw an inspiration, it is less safe and 
satisfying than such coherent and scholastic work 
as Amiens or Reims. Begun about 1165, it was 
finished in 1225, the growth being from the cross- 



102 HEART OF EUROPE 

ing in all directions, for not only is the amazing 
west front of the central period of Gothic per- 
fection, but the choir as well, for the unique 
square termination takes the place of a regular 
chevet which was part of the original design. 
This square-ended choir is the only one in France, 
and is thoroughly English in effect; moreover, 
the transepts have aisles and are the first in 
France to be so finished, while they have tribunes 
at the ends after the Norman fashion, and there 
is a central tower or lantern as well. The towers 
of Laon are its distinguishing glory, for there are 
five in all, out of an original seven, all incomplete, 
not one retaining its spire, but striking and im- 
mensely individual. The interior organism is 
not wholly coherent, for while the vaulting is 
sexpartite throughout, the system is regular, and 
was as manifestly intended for quadripartite vault- 
ing as Noyon for sexpartite. The west front is 
vastly picturesque, if somewhat incoherent, and 
is clearly a growth from year to year; it lacks 
both the sublime calm and grandeur of Paris and 
the faultless organism of Reims, but its detail is 
as brilliantly conceived as any in France, while 
its carvings and sculptures are in the same class 
as the best of Hellas. In the tops of the towers 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 103 

are the well-known stone effigies of oxen, placed 
there by the builders in recognition of the patient 
service of the beasts that year after year helped 
drag the heavy stones from the plain to the top 
of the hill where the cathedral stands. 

In and around Laon were once innumerable 
religious houses, but nearly all their churches 
were destroyed during the French Revolution, 
which annihilated more noble art in five years 
than had happened in five centuries. St. Martin 
remains, and is of the middle of the twelfth cen- 
tury, but the church of the Abbey of St. Vincent 
is wholly destroyed. 

South of Laon, and about as far away as No- 
yon, lies Soissons, an ancient town, famous in 
history, and containing, until the war, another 
masterpiece of mediaeval art, the cathedral, which 
already has been made the target of German 
shells, and has suffered seriously. As a city, it 
antedated the Roman occupation, was Christian- 
ised toward the end of the third century, became 
a capital of the Merovings, and a notable city of 
the Carolingian dynasty. The south transept is 
the oldest part, and dates from about 1175, the 
choir was finished in 1212, the north transept and 
nave about 1250. Porter says of the south tran- 



104 HEART OF EUROPE 

sept: "This portion of Soissons, one of the most 
ethereal of all twelfth-century designs, is the high- 
est expression of that fairy-like, Saracenic phase 
of Gothic art that had first come into being at 
Noyon. Like Noyon, however, this transept lacks 
the elements of grandeur which are found in so 
striking a degree in the nave and choir of this 
same church of Soissons." The nave and choir 
are indeed amongst the noblest creations of 
Catholic art; for justness and delicacy of pro- 
portions, refinement of line, restraint in the 
placing and determination of ornament, Soissons 
ranks with Chartres and Bourges. The richness 
of its vertical lines is unusual, the mouldings clear, 
powerful, and distinguished in contour, and alto- 
gether it has well served for nearly seven cen- 
turies as a perfect exemplar of the Christian art 
of France as its highest point. 

Already it has been appallingly shattered, one 
shell having struck the roof of the north aisle, 
hurling one of the nave shafts into fragments 
and obliterating an entire bay. Thus far it has 
been spared a conflagration, and if the Prussian 
lines are promptly forced back, it may still be 
preserved as a wonder for still further generations. 

So far as the numberless other great churches 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 105 

of Soissons are concerned, it has for long been 
too late; they perished, with uncounted others in 
this region, at the time of the Revolution. Of 
the vast abbey of St. Jean-des-Vignes nothing re- 
mains but the sumptuous west front, cut clear 
like an architectural "frontispiece" from all the 
rest, and even this has been further shattered by 
German gunfire. The royal abbey of Our Lady 
has become a military barracks, St. Crepin, St. 
Medard with its famous seven churches, all have 
vanished, and the loss is irreparable. 

Nearer Paris we find Senlis, a further step in 
architectural development. The town itself is 
charming, and full of old art and old history. 
Roman walls, with sixteen towers, still remain, 
together with fragments of a royal palace of the 
French kings, from Clovis to Henri IV, with 
ancient houses, picturesque streets, desecrated 
churches, and monastic ruins, such as those of 
the Abbey of Victory, founded by Philip Augustus 
after the battle of Bouvines, and wrecked, of 
course, during the Revolution. 

The cathedral is curious and fascinating. Set 
out in 1155 on enormous lines, it was curtailed 
both in height and length through the failure of 
adequate funds. It has been rebuilt, extended, 



106 HEART OF EUROPE 

supplemented, century after century, until it has 
become almost an epitome of French architecture 
from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of 
the sixteenth century. The southwest tower (its 
mate is unfinished) is of the thirteenth-century 
culmination, and surpassed by no other spire in 
France for subtlety of composition and perfection 
of detail. One of its crocketed pinnacles has al- 
ready been shot away, but apparently further 
danger is well removed, and will become progres- 
sively less threatening as the Prussian lines are 
driven back. 

It is, of course, quite impossible even to note 
all the architectural monuments between the 
Seine and the frontiers of Belgium. Paris must 
be wholly left out, for St. Denis, St. Germain 
l'Auxerois, Notre Dame, and the Ste. Chapelle 
would justly require a volume to themselves. 
Rouen, with its cathedral, St. Ouen, St. Maclou, 
the Palais de Justice, rich with all the lace and 
embroidery of the flamboyant period, lies now 
well beyond danger, and so does Beauvais, where 
the nemesis of worldly pride overtook the lagging 
spiritual impulse that had made the Middle Ages 
the climax of Christian civilisation. Chalons-sur- 
Marne, once threatened, is now reprieved, and its 




BEAUVAIS 



THE GLORY OF A GREAT ART 107 

cathedral, its churches of St. Jean and St. Loup, 
and its noble and distinguished Church of Our 
Lady are safe for another period. 

Apart from the great architectural monuments 
are numberless others invaluable in archaeology, 
and forming links in the great Gothic develop- 
ment: St. Etienne of Beauvais, St. Leu d'Es- 
serent, Morienval, Bury, St. Germer, and St. 
Remi of Reims — the last valuable beyond esti- 
mate, with an apse that was unparalleled as a 
masterpiece of transitional work when Gothic was 
in its first and finest estate, now wrecked and 
desecrated by shells that have burst its vaults 
into crumbled fragments and hurled its perfect 
windows in showers of splintered glass to the 
pavements heaped high with the wreck of ma- 
sonry and of dismembered altars. 

And as in the case of the great churches, so in 
that of the small, from Braisne to Caudebec, 
they cannot even be catalogued. The whole re- 
gion was, and is, one of wonderful little parish 
churches, of all periods, and many of them are 
now only shapeless ruins. The great abbeys and 
smaller religious houses are practically gone, scores 
having fallen prey to the insane fury of the Revo- 
lution or the sordid secularism of the Restoration. 



108 HEART OF EUROPE 

What we have lost may be seen from countless 
such lovely and pathetic fragments as St. Wan- 
drille, near Caudebec, given a new fame through 
the name of Maeterlinck, and so linked with the 
greater martyrdom of Belgium in these last days. 
This, like its myriad companions, was architec- 
ture of the most singular beauty, the loss of which 
leaves the world poor, so poor, indeed, that it had 
at first nothing wherewith to meet the last assault 
of the enemy. The loss is being made good, the 
penalty already is paid, and though one could not 
— one would not — restore or rebuild these silent 
fragments of exquisitely wrought stone, meshed 
in tall trees and clambering vines, the vision is 
possible of new foundations, equal in number to 
these that are gone, each an expiation and a 
spiritual guard, each making late reparation for 
the past, guaranteeing a future immunity from 
perils of the same nature as those that now shake 
the world. 



VI 

AMIENS AND REIMS 

TWO monuments there are to the east of the 
Seine that form the realisation of the dim 
but dominant ideal toward which Christian so- 
ciety in France was tending even from the days 
of St. Germer and Jumieges, through the inter- 
mediate and progressive steps of Noyon, Soissons, 
Laon-Amiens, and Reims. Equal in fame, count- 
ing no others in their own category save only 
Chartres and Bourges, the one remains, the other 
has passed for ever. 

It is a strange sensation for us to-day to watch 
from afar the slow and implacable destruction of 
one of the greatest works of art in the world, for 
we must go back more than a century to find any 
catastrophe of a similar nature. What happened 
then, when half a hundred masterpieces of divinely 
directed human intelligence and aspiration were 
reduced to scrap-heaps at the hands of revolution, 
is very far away, and the irreparable loss is as 
unknown to-day as it was unappreciated then. 
We can no more reconstruct for our understand- 

109 



110 HEART OF EUROPE 

ing Cluny, St. Martin of Tours, or Avranches 
than we can restore the catalogue of the Alexan- 
drian library; mercifully we cannot estimate our 
loss. Back of this era of annihilation we must go 
two centuries before we find in England under 
Henry VIII a similar episode of infamy. The 
case of Reims is wholly different; there are tens 
of thousands who knew it for what it was — the 
crowning manifestation of a crowning civilisa- 
tion, and for them the loss is personal, poignant, 
and unexampled, a horror that sophistry cannot 
palliate nor time destroy. 

Of the two great churches, Amiens could more 
easily have been spared. The word is ill chosen; 
Amiens in ruins, its exquisite fagade with its 
perfect sculptures seared and shattered by burst- 
ing shells and consuming fire, would have been 
a catastrophe that could only put to the test the 
most stoical fortitude, but — it is neither Chartres 
nor Bourges nor Reims, and simply because the 
perfect balance between all possible elements in 
great architecture is here trembling toward its 
overthrow. Gothic art had three controlling 
forces working toward an unattainable perfection; 
structural integrity irradiated by consummate in- 
vention and an almost divine creative genius; 



AMIENS AND REIMS 111 

passion for that exalted beauty that is unchange- 
able and eternal, expressed through new forms at 
once northern and Catholic; the just balance 
and intimate interplay of these two impulses. 
Its virtues, like all virtues, were most easily trans- 
muted into vices, once the controlling balance 
was overthrown, and each was, in its stimulating 
possibilities, a constant and irresistible tempta- 
tion toward excess. In Reims, the beginnings of 
which antedate Amiens by only a decade, the 
balance remains true and firm; in Amiens we see 
the first fatal steps in the development of a purely 
human (and notably French) logic, toward that 
intellectual pride, that almost arrogance of self- 
confidence, that found its nemesis in the unstable 
marvel of Beauvais. 

In an admirable but anonymous little book 
called "Some French Cathedrals," the author 
says: "French Gothic was most rational and 
most beautiful while it still remembered its 
Romanesque origin. At Amiens it was just be- 
ginning to forget that and to lose itself in dreams 
of an impossible romance which changed it from 
architecture into a very wonderful kind of or- 
namental engineering." This subtle and signif- 
icant change you feel everywhere except in the 



112 HEART OF EUROPE 

inimitable fagade. The interior is too high, the 
masonry too wire-drawn and tenuous, the chevet 
too giddy and insecure. It is true that all but the 
west front has been impossibly restored, so that 
outwardly little remains of the original work, 
while the glass is gone from all but the ambulatory 
windows, leaving the nave a cold blaze of intol- 
erable light. Nevertheless, the fundamental fault 
is there; the architect intrudes himself in place 
of the devote, the craft of man supplants the guid- 
ing of God; so we have one of the most technically 
perfect of cathedrals, and one of the least inspired; 
you must go to the Rhine to find, in Cologne, a 
more self-conscious and serenely satisfied work, 
and it is well to make this comparison, for by so 
doing you realise the real greatness of Amiens, 
and how it fails only in comparison with the 
three perfect examples of an art that wholly ex- 
presses the great concept of mediaeval Catholic phi- 
losophy, that in life, as we know it, material and 
spiritual are inseparable, that their just balance is 
the true end of man in this phase of existence, and 
that therefore sacramentalism is of the esse of re- 
ligion, and as well the law of life. 

As a whole, both from within and without, 
Amiens in a measure fails, but this does not hold 




AMIENS 



AMIENS AND REIMS 113 

of its several parts. The west front is still a 
masterpiece of consummate and wholly original 
design, though the towers have been incon- 
gruously (but engagingly) terminated in later 
centuries. The three great doors, the first and 
second arcades, and the rose-window story con- 
tain more brilliant, spirited, ingenious, and withal 
beautiful design than any similar work in the 
world, while the ornament (there is a wild-rose 
border around the archi volts of the great porches 
that finds no rival in Greece) and the sculptures 
reach a level of decorative and emotional signif- 
icance that marks the time of their production 
as the crowning moment in human culture and 
in Christian civilisation. 

We turn to Reims — we turn now in reverence 
to the memory of Reims — in a different spirit. 
Master Robert of Luzarches was a master, and 
knew it. Master Robert of Coucy was the servant 
of a Lord who was greater than he, and knew 
this also, and was proud of his service. He was 
just as great an architect as his brother of Amiens, 
but he worked in a godly fear, and so he built 
the noblest church in Christendom. This is not 
to say that its nave order is equal to Chartres, 
its rhythm and composition equal to Bourges. 



114 HEART OF EUROPE 

In every great church from 1175 to 1225 there is 
some one element or more that is final and unex- 
celled, but at Reims there was a great consistency, 
a noble and all-embracing competence, that placed 
it in a class by itself. 

Reims was without a fault; perhaps this made 
its appeal less poignant and searching than that 
of the eager and sometimes less-perfect efforts of 
men more human in their inadequacies. Man is 
the creature that tries, and it is perhaps only 
human to feel a reverence that lessens affection 
for those who seem to transcend the limits that 
are set to human accomplishment. 

Every other cathedral in France is a splendid 
chronicle, a record of changing times, changing 
endeavours, changing impulses. Men of varying 
personalities have wrought out their ideals, year 
after year, and the result is in each case a great 
sequence, a glorious approximation. Reims was 
begun in 1211, on the first anniversary of the 
burning of its predecessor, and it was finished, 
manifestly in accordance with an original and pre- 
determined design, within fifty years. The three 
gables and the upper stories of the western towers 
are a century later, otherwise the work is con- 
sistent and a single conception. The great ideal 



AMIENS AND REIMS 115 

comprised a crowning group of seven towers, 
each with its slender spire, none of which was 
ever completed, and had this majestic scheme 
been carried out, the church would have been the 
most complete, as it was the most perfect, of the 
architectural manifestations of Christianity. 

It is impossible to analyse Reims, to describe 
its vital and exquisite organism, to laud its im- 
peccable scale, its vivid and stimulating original- 
ity, to explain the almost incredible competence 
and beauty of its buttressing, the serene delicacy 
of its detail, to dwell once more on the glory of 
its sculpture that ranked with that of Greece, on 
the splendour of its glass that was rivalled only 
at Chartres. It is impossible to do this now, for 
its passing has been too recent and too grievous. 
Death brings silence for a time to those that 
knew the dead. 

In another chapter I have tried to say some- 
thing of the sculpture of Reims, a crowning glory 
where all was glorious, but sculpture does not 
mean the human figure alone; it covered in the 
Middle Ages all forms of beauty chiselled out of 
stone and marble, and the man who wrought the 
wild-rose design on the archivolts of Amiens was 
just as great an artist as he who fashioned the 



116 HEART OF EUROPE 

Virgin of the south transept, or the "Beau Dieu"; 
perhaps he was the same man. Gothic "orna- 
ment" is quite as beautiful as are Gothic saints 
and angels, and here at Reims the stone carving 
was of the finest. Every space of ornament — 
capital, crocket, boss, frieze, and string-course — 
was a combination of these great elements: archi- 
tectural self-restraint and identity with the work 
as a whole, passionate love for all the beautiful 
things in nature, joy in doing everything, even 
the cutting of unseen surfaces, just as well as man 
could do the work. It is not better than the 
ornament of Amiens or Chartres; in some pas- 
sages Amiens seems to have achieved the highest 
attainable point, but it is of the same quality, 
and that is enough glory for any church. 

Most of this inimitable art already has been 
blasted and calcined away, and the same fate 
has overtaken the glass. Here was an achieve- 
ment of the highest in an art of the best. In the 
light (literally) of the stained glass of our own 
times, we had found some difficulty in realising 
that this was an art at all, but it needed only a 
visit to Chartres or Reims for enlightenment to 
come to us. At Chartres, in the very earliest 
years of the thirteenth century, it reached its 




REIMS 



AMIENS AND REIMS 117 

culmination; there is no greater glass anywhere 
than this, almost no greater art, and Reims, while 
less complete (the aisle windows were wholly re- 
moved by eighteenth-century canons on the score 
of an added "cheerfulness")? was of the same 
school, though later and just past the cresting of 
the wave. If it lacked the unearthly clarity and 
divine radiance of the western lancets, and the 
"Belle Verriere" of Chartres, it had qualities of 
its own, particularly its most glorious azures and 
rubies, that allowed no rival, and it easily ranked 
with Chartres and Bourges and Poitiers as mani- 
festing the possibilities of a noble art, and a lost 
art, at its highest point of achievement. 

So far as can be learned, all this has perished 
and it cannot be restored. It lies in shivered 
heaps where it has fallen and the chapter of the 
glass of Reims is closed. 

Four months ago the ruin already was irrep- 
arable, and since then bombardments have been 
frequent and merciless, nor has the enemy as 
yet been driven beyond the range of gun-fire. 
Whether even the shattered and crumbling fabric 
— wherefrom all carving, all detail, all glass, all 
sculpture has been burned and blasted away — 
survives in the end, none can foretell; but one 



118 HEART OF EUROPE 

thing is sure, and that is that no " restoration" 
must ever be attempted. If enough remains so 
that careful hands may preserve it from disin- 
tegration and make it available for the worship 
of God, well and good, so long as no imitations, 
whether in stone or metal or glass, are intruded 
to mock its vanished glory and obliterate for 
future generations the record of an indelible crime. 
For seven centuries its beauty and its perfection 
have spoken to succeeding generations, each less 
willing to listen than the last. In its ruin and 
its devastation it will speak more clearly and to 
more willing ears, than in any pretentious reha- 
bilitation. 

To the sordid wickedness of its destruction has 
been added the insult of Prussian promises of 
complete restoration — a catastrophe that would 
crown the first with a greater and more contempt- 
ible indignity. Instead, let Reims remain as it is 
left, and then, in Paris, let France, regenerated 
and redeemed, as already has gloriously happened, 
make for ever visible her restoration, through 
blood and suffering, to her old ideals, by carrying 
out her vow to build in honour of Ste. Jeanne d'Arc 
a great new church, raise a new Reims, like the 
old in plan and form and dimensions. Not a copy, 



AMIENS AND REIMS 119 

but a revival, with the old ideals, the old motives, 
the old self -consecration; different, as the new 
must differ from the old, but akin in spirit and in 
truth. 

If one only knew how to interpret it, there is 
some mysterious significance in the centring of 
the war of the world around Reims and in the 
persistent and successful efforts of the Prussians 
to raze it to the ground. Seven centuries ago the 
mystics of St. Victor would have read the riddle, 
but for too long now we have been out of temper 
with symbolism and too averse to the acceptance 
of signs and portents to be able to see even dimly 
the correspondences and the significance of those 
human happenings that are actually outside hu- 
man control. In a way Reims was the ancient 
heart of France, as Paris is not, and it always was 
a sacred city above all others — and sacred it is 
now as never before. It was here that the Chris- 
tianising of the Franks was sealed by the baptism 
of Clovis, A. D. 496, by St. Remi, the canonised 
bishop who occupied the see for seventy-five 
years. The crowning of kings (every sovereign 
but four for a period of fifteen hundred years 
came here for his coronation), the assembling of 
great councils of the Church, the beneficent ac- 



120 HEART OF EUROPE 

tivities of universities and schools of philosophy- 
were all commonplaces of the life of the city, 
while it was here that Ste. Jeanne d'Arc finally 
discomfited the English and led her King to his 
crowning in the church that is now destroyed. 

Time and again the city has been devastated, 
from the Vandals of 392 to those of 1914. During 
the Revolution its churches suffered bitterly; the 
cathedral and St. Remi, until then, were rich 
with unnumbered shrines, altars, statues, tombs, 
while cloisters and religious buildings of many 
kinds surrounded them on all sides. All this 
wealth of hoarded art that expressed the piety and 
culture of centuries was swept away, even to the 
sacred ampulla of holy oil, piously believed to 
have been brought by a dove for the consecration 
of Clovis and ever after miraculously replenished 
for each succeeding coronation. To this irrepara- 
ble devastation was added the indignity of official 
"restoration," though in the case of the cathedral 
at the able and scrupulous hands of Viollet-le- 
Duc, and in the nineteenth century the picturesque 
and beautiful old streets gave place to boulevards 
and a general Hausmanising on approved Parisian 
lines, so that in 1914 the city had become dull and 
somewhat pretentious, framing the two priceless 



AMIENS AND REIMS 121 

jewels, the Church of Our Lady of Reims and that 
of the holy St. Remi. 

All is now gone, the glorious and the insignif- 
icant alike overwhelmed in indiscriminating ruin. 
The glass and the statues that had survived war, 
revolution, and stupidity are shattered in frag- 
ments, the roofs consumed by fire, the vaults 
burst asunder, the carved stones calcined and 
flaking hourly in a dreary rain on blood-stained 
pavements where a hundred kings have trod and 
into deserted streets that have echoed to the 
footsteps of threescore generations. The city has 
passed; deleta est Carthago, but it has left a mem- 
ory, a tradition, and an inspiration that may 
yet play a greater part in the rebuilding of civil- 
isation than could have been achieved by its re- 
maining monuments as they stood making their 
unheeded appeal on the day the first shell was 
fired from the Prussian batteries on the eastern 
hills. 

The tendency I have spoken of which showed 
itself in Amiens, the breaking up of the mediaeval 
integrity and a consequent inclination toward 
undue emphasis on structural and intellectual 
arrogance, never went very far because of the 
ill days that fell on France. The victory of the 



122 HEART OF EUROPE 

French crown over the Papacy, with the result- 
ing transfer of the Holy See to Avignon, was the 
ruin of Catholic civilisation in France, as well as 
in Italy and the rest of Christendom. The Church 
became subservient to the state and progressively 
corrupt in root and branch. The wars with Eng- 
land resulted in nothing less than ruin, and cul- 
ture and art came to an end. By 1370 building 
had become thin, poor, uninspired, and yet, with- 
in the next ten years flamboyant architecture 
appeared, and the fifteenth century opened with 
a sudden burst of artistic splendour. Heaven 
knows what it all means ; France was at her low- 
est depth, and yet, without warning, a regenera- 
tion took place. The Blessed Jeanne d'Arc ap- 
pears like a miraculous vision, Orleans is saved, 
the rightful king is crowned, and though the mar- 
tyrdom of the saviour of France takes place in 
1430, the English are driven out in 1456, and a 
new day begins. 

Was Jeanne d'Arc a single manifestation of a 
new spirit that had entered society, or was this 
itself a continuation of what she had initiated 
under God? The answer does not really matter, 
the important fact is that a great regeneration 
took place, and a new type of art followed in its 



AMIENS AND REIMS 123 

wake. Now the tendency was away from the 
proud efficiency of a glorified architectural en- 
gineering and toward the other element in archi- 
tecture, beauty of form and splendour of ornament. 
It was almost as though the French had turned 
to religion and beauty as their only refuge from 
the miseries of their estate. In the very first 
years of the fifteenth century, at the darkest 
hours of France, Notre Dame de l'Epine, close by 
Chalons on the Marne, was built in 1419. Caude- 
bec in 1426, St. Maclou, Rouen, in 1432, and 
after these for more than a century France aban- 
doned herself to the creation of works of architec- 
tural art that, whatever they may lack of the 
splendid consistency and the divine serenity of 
the thirteenth century, are nevertheless amongst 
the loveliest works of man. Beauvais is an ad- 
mirable example of the two tendencies; begun in 
1225, its impossible choir was finished in 1272, 
only to collapse twelve years later, paying the 
penalty of its structural arrogance. For forty 
years it was in process of reconstruction, after 
a more conservative fashion though of its original 
dimensions, and in 1500 the transepts were be- 
gun and finished fifty years later. In beauty 
and in an almost riotous richness, they are the 



124 HEART OF EUROPE 

crowning work of this phase of design, while the 
choir itself, with its marvellously articulated sys- 
tem of buttresses, is a creation of sheer architec- 
tural power almost unrivalled. Ambitious and 
defiant, the canons now, in 1550, reared a vast 
spire over the crossing, nearly 450 feet high, and 
of the same sumptuous design as the transepts. 
The whole stupendous erection fell twenty-five 
years later, and has never been rebuilt, while the 
nave was never even begun; so Beauvais remains 
a vast fragment, and a living commentary on 
the excesses and the penalties of that pride of 
life that succeeded to the spiritual humility of 
the Middle Ages. 

The new style, however, was perfectly adapted 
to the new life of secular supremacy, and, with 
few exceptions, both here in eastern France and 
in Flanders and Brabant and the Netherlands, 
the great civic monuments and the innumerable 
chateaux of an expanding and ripening society 
are couched in its beautiful and elaborate terms. 
Essentially it is a mode of ornament, containing 
no new element in organism, but always beau- 
tiful and, in France at all events, marked always 
by delicate and admirable taste. With its flame- 
like tracery, its complicated pinnacles, its scaf- 



AMIENS AND REIMS 125 

foldings of intricate latticework; with its curved 
and aspiring lines, glimmering niches, pierced 
parapets, open-work spires, and its tangled foliage, 
dainty filigree-work and sculptured lace, it is a 
marvel of imagination, dramatic sense, and con- 
summate craftsmanship. Sometimes it is strik- 
ingly competent in its composition, as in the tran- 
septs of Beauvais and the front of Troyes, the 
latter being in its unfulfilled promise (it is only 
a beginning) one of the great fagades of France, 
but frequently its greatest weakness is forgetful- 
ness of consistency in a passion for beauty of line 
and light and shade that became almost insane. 
With the beginning of the sixteenth century the 
new art began slowly to decay in ecclesiastical 
buildings, but it continued for at least another 
hundred years in chateaux and civic work, and 
it is this in particular that is now disappearing 
through a war waged by unprecedented methods 
and in accordance with principles (if we may call 
them such) which hitherto have been found associ- 
ated only with barbarian invasions or the frenzies 
of a mad anarchy that has called itself Revolution. 
For the more distinguished chateaux we must 
go outside our chosen field, to the Loire, Touraine, 
or to other parts of France where the devastation 



126 HEART OF EUROPE 

of past wars and revolutions is less complete. 
There is Pierrefonds, of course, if one cares for 
that sort of thing, but of authentic castles of the 
sixteenth century there are few of notable quality, 
though many minor farms and manors still re- 
mained in August, 1914. Ecouen and Chantilly 
are exceptions, and the latter, given to the nation 
by the Due d'Aumale when he was exiled by 
the republic for the crime of belonging to the 
legitimate line of kings, is a good example of the 
princely buildings of the Renaissance when the 
last fires of Gothic spirit were dying away. 

It is not so long ago that half the towns in 
France between the Seine and the Belgian fron- 
tier were threaded by wonderful little streets of 
stone-built and half-timber houses three centuries 
old, and bright with squares and market-places 
framed in old architecture of Francis I and Henri 
II. Their quaint and delicate beauty was too 
much for the nineteenth century, however, which 
revolted against an old art as it revolted against 
an old culture and an older religion, so nearly all 
are gone, their place being taken by substitutes, 
the destruction of which could hardly be counted 
against the Prussians for unrighteousness, if one 
considered aesthetic questions alone, which is, for- 



AMIENS AND REIMS 127 

tunately, impossible. For these dim old streets 
and sunny silent squares one could, until a few 
months ago, go confidently across the border, 
finding in Flanders, Brabant, Liege, and Luxem- 
bourg relief from the appalling sophistication that 
had taken possession of the old cities of Cham- 
pagne. Even in France, until last year, were 
Douai, Pont-a-Mousson, Meaux, and of course 
Arras, though now of some of these worse than 
nothing remains. In the latter city was once, 
also, a particularly splendid example of those 
great civic halls that showed forth the pride and 
the independence of the industrial cities of the 
later Middle Ages, and another stood in Douai. 
As Flanders and Brabant are, however, the chosen 
places for this particular manifestation of an in- 
dustrial civilisation, so different to our own in 
spirit and in expression, we may include them 
therewith, where they racially and historically 
belong; and having followed the development of 
an essentially religious art in France from Ju- 
mieges to Beauvais, note its translation in later 
years into civic forms, in the little and heroic 
Kingdom with so great and heroic a history, now 
and for many months shut off from the world 
still free, by the veil of smoke and poisoned gases. 



VII 

THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 

^T^HE great civic halls were those of Aude- 
-*■ naarde, Brussels, Louvain, Malines, Ter- 
monde, Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, and Arras, and each 
of these cities was as well full of wonderful old 
houses, some private residences, some quarters for 
the various guilds. It is impossible to discrimi- 
nate between past and present tense in describing 
them; some are wholly gone, as Ypres and Arras, 
others we suppose still remain, but how long this 
may be true one cannot say. If we lose what we 
have lost in the onrush of a victorious army, and 
in its long holding of defensive lines in the most 
amazing siege in history, what may we not ex- 
pect at the hands of an army in defeat, fighting 
its way back to its own frontiers for a last des- 
perate stand? Arras, Ypres, and Louvain were 
hard enough to lose, but the soul shudders at the 
thought of Bruges and Ghent, Antwerp and Brus- 
sels, fought over day after day and abandoned to 
pillage and destruction. 

128 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 129 

The historical significance of these halls 'is very 
great; they put into material (and as we had 
thought enduring) form the oligarchical democ- 
racy, the great wealth, the pride, the sumptuous 
and lavish spirit of successive generations of 
princely merchants and manufacturers. Religion 
was still a vital force, but it no longer stood alone, 
and now the secular organisations of guilds and free 
cities claimed and received the tribute of wealth 
through the ministry of art. It was not the old 
art of the days of cathedral building and the 
founding of abbeys and universities, it was quite 
a different art altogether, but it fitted the new 
motives and ideals as the other could not do. Of 
severity, self-restraint, reticence, it has nothing; 
it is all splendour and magnificence, emulation and 
rivalry, but it is still craftsman's art, and what- 
ever the taste of these great and even fantastic 
buildings, there is proof of joyful workmanship 
and of a jealous maintenance of the highest pos- 
sible standards. 

Ypres was the first in point of time, and first in 
absolute artistic value. Begun by Count Baldwin 
in the year 1200, it was remodelled, rebuilt, em- 
bellished for a hundred years, and finally the 
"Nieuwerke," of the most abandoned Renaissance 



130 HEART OF EUROPE 

taste, was added to the east. Of huge dimensions 
— the main front was four hundred and thirty- 
three feet in length, while the great tower was 
two hundred and thirty feet high — the design was 
as simple, imposing, and direct as one would ex- 
pect to find during the early thirteenth century. 
It was a simple parallelogram, three stories high, 
nobly arcaded, with ranges of fine niches which 
contained statues of the Counts of Flanders and 
other worthies, until these were completely de- 
stroyed by the French during the Revolution. 
A vast, high-pitched roof covered all, broken in 
the middle by the belfry, with its corner turrets, 
which were echoed at the four corners of the 
building by similar spires. A simpler composi- 
tion could hardly be imagined, or one more im- 
pressive in its grave restraint. Architecturally 
it was unique; there was and is no other rival 
of a similar nature, and its value was inestimable. 
Bold in conception, straightforward, direct, con- 
fident without assurance, it was one great master- 
piece of the civic art of the Middle Ages, mirac- 
ulously preserved for six centuries as the visible 
manifestation of the supreme quality of a great 
people and a great art. Both without and within 
it had that spontaneousness, that fine, frank 




THE DESTROYED HOTEL DE VILLE OF ARRAS 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 131 

naivete that one finds in all crescent periods and 
searches for in vain in the following days that 
history always selects for particular admiration. 
Analyse it and see how simple it all was. First 
there were three chief organic elements : the great 
wall unbroken by any "features," without but- 
tresses because it was not vaulted; the enormous, 
high-pitched roof bare of all gables or diversions 
of any kind; the square, unbuttressed tower in 
the middle, with a tall, pointed roof and cupola, 
surrounded by four high pinnacles of the simplest 
form. It is as calm and simple as a Greek temple, 
and like this, also, it is final in the perfection of 
its proportions and its relation of parts; also its 
great, quiet elements are left alone, not tortured 
into nervous complexity of varying planes and ex- 
citable vagaries of light and shade. Forty-eight 
pointed and mullioned windows along the main 
floor give the horizontal divisions, while vertically 
there were three stages: the low, lintelled colon- 
nade, a mezzanine with very beautiful traceried 
windows, one to each bay, and a vast main wall 
without horizontal subdivisions but with a del- 
icately designed and very broad course of trace- 
ried panelling above the splendid sequence of great 
windows, like a lofty blind parapet. The tower 



132 HEART OF EUROPE 

was equally simple, its seven stories exquisitely 
varied in their heights and windowing, but calm 
always, and final in their sense of exactly felt re- 
lations. The pinnacles also, four on the tower and 
others at either end of the fagade, were as simply 
and perfectly designed as could be asked, without 
fantastic exuberance or a straining for effect; 
just traceried octagons with one series of pointed 
gables and high, crocketed spires. 

The "Nieuwerke," in its ridiculous Renais- 
sance effrontery snuggled up against the silent, 
absorbed, unnoticing giant, was like an architec- 
tural version of Merlin and Vivien; silly and 
scented impudence in its vain approximations 
to grave dignity and a self-respect proof against 
all blandishments. 

The great hall inside was just the same: an as- 
tonishing room, four hundred and thirty feet long, 
broken only by the columns and arches bearing the 
great tower, and roofed with a mass of oak tim- 
bering like an ancient and enormous ship turned 
bottom up. Huge oaken beams rose against the 
wall dividing it into panels, and each pair sup- 
ported equally gigantic tie-beams braced by rough- 
hewn diagonal struts. It was barn-building, if you 
like, but a good barn is better art than a Newport 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 133 

"cottage"; and this splendidly direct "barn" at 
Ypres had a quality the Louvre could never 
attain. 

Each panel of this colossal and almost in- 
terminable wall was destined for great historical 
pictures, most of which had been completed, and 
the effect was majestical in its combination of 
colour and carpentry. Of it all nothing now re- 
mains, as I have said, except a single turret at 
one end. The greatest surviving monument of 
the civic architecture of the Middle Ages has 
been slowly pounded to powder, and has taken 
its place with the other lost masterpieces of a 
world that from time to time can create but 
can somehow never retain ability to enjoy or 
even to understand. Month after month it was 
the special target of Prussian shells; the first 
breeched the wall to the right of the tower and 
were followed by others that started fires which 
swept the building from end to end, consuming the 
enormous timbered roof, destroying the painted 
walls, crumbling the tracery of the tall tower. For 
a time the burned-out walls remained, and Ger- 
man professors spoke gently and with bland re- 
assurance of the simple task of restoration, but 
this last indignity has ceased to threaten, for 



134 HEART OF EUROPE 

recently the batteries have resumed their work; 
little by little the belfry has been shot away, the 
fretted arcades have been splintered into road- 
metal, and now at last the destruction is com- 
plete; what once was the glory of Ypres, the 
pride of Flanders, the delight of the architect, 
is now only a heap of refuse masonry, with one 
pinnacle standing alone, accusing, in the midst of 
ruin from which there is no salvation, for which 
history will search in vain for shadow of excuse. 

In sequence of time, the old "Halles" of Ma- 
lines come next, as portions of them date from 1311, 
but they have been reconstructed at various times, 
enlarged in several styles, and in the end were 
never completed, for their great belfry never suc- 
ceeded in getting above the roof. Nevertheless 
they were a wonderfully picturesque and even 
theatrical composition of pointed portals, fan- 
tastic gables, dormers, and turrets, and a very en- 
gaging epitome of five centuries of architectural 
mutations. 

The Hotel de Ville of Bruges is as consistent 
and perfect as Malines was casual and irrespon- 
sible. It was begun in 1376, the corner-stone 
being laid by Louis de Male, and if there is any- 
where a more complete example of civic architec- 




BRUGES, HOTEL DE VILLE 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 135 

ture, combining the restraint and the simplicity 
of early Gothic with the exquisite ornament and 
the sense of decorative beauty of the latest Gothic, 
it is not of record. It seems to come at the mid- 
most point, when everything met together, without 
loss and without exaggeration, for the production 
of a living example of what society is capable 
when it achieves a perfect, if unenduring, equilib- 
rium. It is a masterpiece of architectural com- 
position, of brilliant and supremely intelligent 
design, while it is vivified by a poetry and an in- 
spiration that exist only at a few crowning mo- 
ments in history. Even now it is one of the love- 
liest buildings in Europe; what it must have been 
once, when its fifty statues, each under its crock- 
eted canopy (they also were pulled down and 
hammered in pieces during the French Revolu- 
tion), its tracery, balustrades, and pinnacles were 
blazing with colour and gilding, passes the imagina- 
tion. It is only a small building of six bays sub- 
divided by its three turrets into two triple groups 
with a doorway in each. The composition is 
very subtle and quite original, while the design 
is emphasised vertically, there being no hori- 
zontal members which run through from end to 
end, though the levels are very delicately indi- 



136 HEART OF EUROPE 

cated by window mullions, niches, panels, traceried 
arches, and the crowning parapet. It is one of 
the least obvious of architectural compositions 
and, I am disposed to think, one of the best. 
While it lacks the Doric simplicity of Ypres, it 
has a sensitive rhythm and a richness of light and 
shade without studied intricacy or premeditated 
theatricalism that places it amongst the few very 
perfect works of art. It is a "poetic" composi- 
tion in the highest sense, or rather it is akin to 
music of the mode that followed the Gregorian 
and opened up new possibilities of a more com- 
plex, if no more poignant, spiritual expression. 
It is perhaps the most perfect single piece of 
architecture in Belgium, and if it is extinguished 
in the night of Armageddon we lose a thing of 
inestimable value, unequalled, irreplaceable, even 
as we have lost that equally inestimable spiritual 
force that brought it into existence. 

The "Halles" also, with their famous "Belfry 
of Bruges" are a particularly noble example of 
the same period of artistic supremacy, though 
they lack consistency, for only the lower stages 
of the amazing tower are original, this portion 
of the work being completed about 1296. All 
the upper part is of the very end of the fifteenth 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 137 

century, and the octagonal upper stage is of no 
high order of design. Once this also was crowned 
by a slender spire having a statue of St. Michael 
sixteen feet high, which must have brought the 
stupendous erection almost to a height of five 
hundred feet, for even now the topmost balustrade 
is three hundred and fifty-two feet above the 
street. Ten years after the spire was finished it 
was destroyed by lightning, rebuilt, destroyed 
again, and then left in its present condition. 

Brussels followed Bruges, and its huge City 
Hall was begun about 1404. Compared with 
Arras, Bruges, or Louvain, it is dry and somewhat 
unimaginative, with a curious modern look that 
may, in part, be due to very drastic restorations 
and to the devilish ingenuity in destruction of 
the French Revolutionists. In the beginning, 
however, it failed in subtle proportions, and in 
point of composition as well. Its belfry, grace- 
ful as it is, is thin and artificial in effect, while 
the fagade is formal without the grave majesty 
of Ypres, rich without the sensitive refinement of 
Bruges or the riotous exuberance of Louvain. 
This is not to condemn it as bad; except for the 
supreme qualities of the three monuments last 
mentioned it would stand high in the architec- 



138 HEART OF EUROPE 

tural scale, but it is impossible to avoid compari- 
sons, and through these it suffers, perhaps unjustly. 
Less than fifty years after Brussels came Lou- 
vain, and so far as good art is concerned the 
three-quarters of a century since Bruges has not 
been altogether well spent. As in the case of re- 
ligious architecture, an ungoverned passion for 
beauty and craftsmanship has resulted in the de- 
struction of the sane and noble balance in such 
churches as Reims, such civic halls as Bruges and 
Ypres, while nothing is left but an almost impos- 
sible luxuriance, as of a northern flower forced in 
the hot, moist air of a greenhouse. The Hotel de 
Ville of Louvain, spared by some inconsequent 
and unnatural whim of those who wrecked all 
the city around and gave over the priceless li- 
braries of the university to the flames, is one of 
the smallest of its kind in Belgium; it is only 
one hundred and thirteen feet long, forty-one feet 
wide, and seventy feet to the level of its parapet 
— about the dimensions, let us say, of an average 
New York dwelling of the better class. It is less 
a building than an ornament — a shrine, a taber- 
nacle for the sanctuary of a cathedral. You feel 
that you want to take it up and polish it, you re- 
gard it as you do an ivory carving from Pekin, 




THE HOTEL DE VILLE OF LOUVAIN 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 139 

and so considered it is well-nigh matchless, but it 
still remains outside the category of architecture, 
and if you compare it with the Ste. Chapelle, you 
see at once that the life is already almost gone 
from a great art, even if it has passed for the 
moment into a supreme kind of decoration. 

In making that statement one is led unawares 
into one of those generalisations that contains 
less than half the truth. The life had indeed gone 
from the larger, the official architecture, the art 
of the Church, of the commune. After this there 
was little more than a sorry tale of rapid degen- 
eration, until the French and the Jesuits came 
with their new style, either clever and often in 
good taste at the hands of the secular power, or 
tawdry and rococo when popularised by the 
new religious order that was the first incarnation 
of that "efficiency" that in the end became the 
obsession of the world and the root of the war. 
It is true that the new fashion rapidly superseded 
the dying and disintegrating spirit of medieval- 
ism, and never a Bruges town hall or a Malines 
cathedral came again; instead we get the dull 
and blundering seventeenth-century portion of the 
Ghent Hotel de Ville and the showy and very vul- 
gar Jesuit churches, such as that in Antwerp (at- 



140 HEART OF EUROPE 

tributed to Rubens) and the Cathedral of Arras. 
On the other hand, and this is too often forgotten, 
the degradation of state architecture always pre- 
cedes by many years, sometimes centuries, the 
downfall of the people's art, and after a great era 
of high character and cultural attainments the 
burghers and lesser nobility, the farmers and mer- 
chants and smaller monastic houses continue 
instinctively to build beautifully, prolonging the 
old traditions, unhampered by clever architects 
and the commands of irresponsible fashion, until 
at last even they succumb and their art falls to the 
dead level of the stupid artifice that for long had 
prevailed amongst the great of earth. 

So in France while the barbarities of the Louvre 
were being perpetrated, the loveliest little cha- 
teaux and farms and village churches were rising 
almost as though nothing had happened; so in 
Germany, Heidelberg and Dresden could not pre- 
vent the Tyrol and Rothenbourg, Hildesheim and 
the Black Forest and the Rhineland from creating 
the eternally delightful timber houses that far 
more exactly expressed a racial quality that was 
to endure in all its fineness, until the end of the 
nineteenth century saw its ending as well. So in 
England, Henry VIII and Edward VI might de- 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 141 

stroy the then vital art, and Elizabeth might ex- 
punge its very memory, building ridiculous semi- 
German conceits to the grief of the judicious; 
nevertheless the deep-lying tradition prevailed 
outside court circles and those of the Erastian- 
ised Church, and the sixteenth-century domestic 
architecture of the Cotswolds, of Surrey, Suffolk, 
Norfolk, and Essex — indeed of almost every 
county in England — was, in its way, just as good 
architecture as that which universally prevailed 
before the "Great Pillage." 

Precisely the same thing happened in Belgium, 
and half the visual charm of cities such as Bruges, 
Tournai, Termonde, Ypres, and of all that coun- 
tryside that has not been devastated by the in- 
sane cult of coal and iron, is due to the colloquial 
domestic architecture of its crooked old streets, 
its wide-spread market-places, and its drowsy 
canals and winding quays. In the language of 
the schools there is no "architecture," properly 
speaking, in the Quai aux Avoines, or the Grand 
Beguinage, or the old almshouses of the Abbaye 
de St. Trond in Malines, along the banks of the 
Dyle in murdered Lou vain, on the Quai aux 
Herbes in Ghent, the market-place in Ypres, the 
Quai du Rosaire, and the Quai Verte in Bruges. 



142 HEART OF EUROPE 

All the same, in the simple and naive houses and 
hospitals and convents, with their windows and 
doors where they are wanted, their big roofs and 
gables and friendly chimneys, their frank use of 
native materials, and their almost unfailing sense 
of pleasant proportions, we have what thus far 
no school has been able to teach. 

In the earlier work — early, that is, for domes- 
tic architecture, say of the sixteenth century — 
while there is great individuality, each burgher ex- 
pressing himself and his own tastes to the full, 
there is a very courtly regard for his neighbours, 
and a curious sense of restraint in the light of 
what the city itself might expect from its citizens. 
There is a well-bred uniformity of scale, a reti- 
cence in detail, a total lack of jealous emulation 
that speaks well for the self-respect of the old 
builders. Most of the great houses of the pre- 
ceding century are gone, either razed entirely or 
mutilated and degraded to base uses; Bruges, 
for example, that once was rich in sumptuous 
mansions of nobles and great merchants, has now 
almost none, but the quays of Ghent still retain 
their fine rows of guild-houses and dwellings, and 
until a year ago Ypres once had them also, that 
are models of fine civic architecture (and of civic 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 143 

spirit as well), and might well serve as such to a 
more chaotic and unbalanced generation. They 
are usually three stories high, with three more in 
the stepped gables, and the materials are gener- 
ally brick with trimmings of cut stone, though 
wood was frequently used, particularly in Ypres, 
and always in the most consistent and joiner-like 
way. If there were no other test, you could 
always tell the work of a good period from that 
of a bad by the frankness in use of materials: 
brick is brick, stone is stone, and wood is wood, 
and there are no shams, imitations, or subter- 
fuges anywhere. Whatever the land produces, 
that is used and made the most of, while the style 
of the time (mark, not the fashion of the hour or 
the fad of the school or the whim of the artist) is 
so modified as to adapt itself perfectly to these 
restrictions. 

It is not until the Renaissance that the cult of 
deception comes in, and mutton masquerades as 
lamb, while silly columns and pediments are 
pasted on where there is no need and brick is 
plastered over to magnify the apparent opulence 
of the owner. It is at this same time that a mean 
individualism appears, and each builder tries to 
outface his neighbor. The Grande Place in Brus- 



144 HEART OF EUROPE 

sels is a good example of this new selfishness, and 
for chaotic originality compares almost favourably 
with a city street of the nineteenth century. It 
is all very amusing, these rows of serrated slices, 
bedecked with mishandled "orders" and crested 
with miscellaneous gorgeousness on the lines of 
the sterns of the proud owner's still prouder gal- 
leons, and the result is engagingly theatrical and 
fantastic, but it is a grave commentary on a new 
civilisation that has lost in culture just in pro- 
portion as it has increased in efficiency. 

It is dangerous to think too much about archi- 
tecture — or any art for that matter. The thir- 
teenth century was supreme in its achievement 
because it thought so much about religion and 
character and getting the really good things out 
of life that for reward it was actually inspired, 
and so probably thought as little about its art 
as it did about eugenics; being quite content to 
do the things it was impelled to do by an im- 
pulse for which it was not consciously responsible 
and which it made little effort to control. The 
Renaissance thought so much about art, as well 
as about its own thoughts (which didn't matter 
anyway), that even in its best work there is an 
opulent self-consciousness that defeats its own 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 145 

ends and has issue at last in a self-conscious 
opulence that is the nadir of culture. These 
builders of Flanders and Brabant and Artois and 
Luxembourg and the Rhineland thought as little 
about art as their very different followers of the 
Middle Ages, and they certainly lacked the 
divine inspiration that made Reims superhuman, 
as St. Thomas Aquinas and Lionardo da Vinci 
and Shakespeare were superhuman, but the old 
instinct for beauty had not been burned and 
hammered out of them by coal and iron, or re- 
versed into an unintelligible jargon (like the 
Lord's Prayer said backward) by an insolent in- 
tellectualism and a mordant secularism; and so, 
even when they used pseudo-Renaissance forms 
in their cheerful and humorous fashion, they 
managed to produce work that has a certain 
quality that the best-educated architect of this 
century of efficient training cannot contrive to 
obtain in spite of all his labours. 

And in any town that had been left alone during 
the nineteenth century, particularly in Bruges, 
as well as in many of those the Prussians have 
destroyed, everything seems to fall into pictur- 
esque and beautiful compositions that are the de- 
spair of modern planners and "improvers" of 



146 HEART OF EUROPE 

cities. Here again the results were quite unpre- 
meditated. You cannot imagine the builders of 
the Gruuthiise in Bruges carefully arranging their 
effects of gables and turrets and mullioned win- 
dows with scrupulous regard to the soaring tower 
of Our Lady's Church; you cannot imagine the 
wealthy burghers who from time to time reared 
the varied structures along the canal and the 
Quai du Rosaire or in the Rue de l'Ane Aveugle 
(the names are as joyful as the architecture) or 
around the Pont du Beguinage, working studiously 
for their dramatic effects with square and triangle, 
tentative models, and perhaps the able advice of 
a "Landscape Architect" or a "Scenic Artist." 
If they had done this they might have produced 
a tolerable stage-setting or even a superior sort 
of world's fair, but they would not have built 
Bruges. 

No, the conviction has been growing, and is 
now forced on us by a revealing war, that even 
in the seventeenth century there were those who 
possessed a civilisation and a culture beside which 
ours is a kind of raw barbarism; that they by 
force of this, and with the aid of a tradition of 
still greater days in the past, built by instinct as 
we cannot build by erudition; and that what- 



THE BURGHERS AND THEIR BUILDING 147 

ever issued from their hands was admirable and 
honourable and lastingly fair. It is well for us to 
remember sometimes when we amuse ourselves 
by discourse as to "inalienable rights of man," 
and that sort of thing, that there is one such over 
which no argument is possible, and that is the 
right to beauty in life and thought and environ- 
ment, and that those who filched this from us 
during the century and a half just passed (and for 
the first time in history) were tyrants and robbers 
of the same stamp and degree as their immediate 
predecessors, who destroyed the other right of man 
to free and joyful labour as well as that to the gen- 
uine self-government and the sane and wholesome 
democracy that marked the Middle Ages and van- 
ished with the despots and the dogmas of the Re- 
naissance; not to return, so far as we ourselves can 
perceive of our own experience. 

God grant we may retain what is still left us 
in Flanders and Brabant. If by the triumph of 
coal and iron either through war or (perhaps 
even worse) through the imposition on terri- 
tories thus far spared of the ideals and methods 
of an efficient industrialism, we lose Bruges as 
we have lost Ypres and Arras and Malines and 
Termonde, as we had already lost, though in a 



148 HEART OF EUROPE 

different way, Liege and Lille, Mons and Namur, 
then by so much (and it is very much) have we 
lost our hidden leaven that in the fulness of time 
we rely on for the lightening of the whole dull 
lump of our misguided and now discredited life. 



VIII 

COAL AND IRON 

ACROSS the face of Europe stretched a great 
L scar, even before the war; a scar that reached 
from Picardy and Artois across Brabant and the 
Rhineland far into Westphalia. It was an open 
wound, creeping gangrenously outward, and yearly 
involving more and more of what once was healthy 
and fair in its progressive putrefaction. It was an 
area of darkness that had taken the place of light; 
of burrowings far down in the earth where men 
(and women and children once) grubbed dully 
and breathlessly for poor wages on which to sus- 
tain life, life that was mostly the same dull grub- 
bing above the surface as below. It was a place 
of warfare between an immemorial verdure of 
trees and flowers and grass, clear streams and 
pure air and, on the other hand, ever-growing 
heaps of slag and ashes and scoriae, of fat smoke 
and noxious gases. In place of old churches and 
quiet monasteries, of farms and flocks and forests, 
of delicate chateaux and vine-clad old ruined 
castles, of sleepy towns, of winding streets full of 

149 



150 HEART OF EUROPE 

carved and gabled houses, grass-grown market- 
places, still canals under their arched bridges, 
ancient trees and forgotten gardens, with now 
and then a vast and mysterious church built out 
of many ages and crowded with old memories 
and the aroma of spent incense and vanished 
prayers — in place of this impractical, inefficient, 
and very admirable old land of a hundred years 
ago, had come a great noise, a greater activity, 
and a remarkable diminution of enduring re- 
sults. The churches had been despoiled by the 
Huguenots, wrecked by the Revolutionists, and 
either sold for cash or restored out of pure delight 
in wickedness, coupled with a conceit that only ac- 
companies the profoundest ignorance. Monstrous 
piles of brick, iron, and cement had blistered 
the land, while the woods and fields were scored 
and tangled by railway-lines, tram-lines, telegraph- 
lines. Machines everywhere, under and on and 
over the earth; noise, oil, gas, smoke, chemicals 
mingled in the making of a new civilisation, and the 
old was both forgotten and denied. It was a place 
where Efficiency was god, and his First Com- 
mandment was lawfully obeyed; where old virtues 
were transmuted through exaggeration and over- 
emphasis into new sins, where souls shrivelled, 



COAL AND IRON 151 

brains atrophied, manners ceased, that ten might 
amass wealth they could not use, at the expense 
of a thousand who had claimed only a competence. 

A land of coal and iron, and of what coal and 
iron can produce. Not happiness, not character, 
not culture; neither philosophy, nor religion, nor 
art. Machines — appalling and ingenious com- 
plications of wheels and cogs and valves and 
pistons, that made more of their kind, together 
with unheard-of engines of death and mutilation. 
And factories — emplacements for machines that 
roared and vibrated endlessly, spinning, weav- 
ing, fabricating night and day, turning out what 
the world needs, but craftily fashioning it so it 
would not last, or what the world does not need, 
but that lasted only too long. Turning out 
wealth, ugliness, hatred, power, ignorance, and 
revolt. A land of coal and iron, black and poten- 
tial as the first; hard, inhuman, irresistible as 
the last. 

The Heart of Europe has produced many things 
in its time, dynasties, empires, crusades; religious 
energy, new philosophies, industrial revolutions, 
immortal art. Three eras have owed it much: 
that of Charlemagne, that of the Middle Ages, 
that of the Renaissance-Reformation. Perhaps, 



152 HEART OF EUROPE 

after all, the latest is its greatest debtor, and 
for its culmination in that civilisation of irrelig- 
ion, intellectualism, materialism, and unhampered 
force that is riding now for its fall, it may be 
that the self-destructive energy has issued from 
Lille, Maubeuge, and Charleville, from Liege and 
Charleroi, from Crefeld and Essen, Eschweiler and 
Elberfeld. 

The Black Country of England, the southern 
counties of Wales; Pittsburgh, Chicago, Paterson, 
Lawrence, Manchester; cities innumerable in Great 
Britain and America, have joined in the great act 
of creating a new ideal and a new power, but the 
culmination that is its own antidote did not 
manifest itself there; instead it seems now to 
have developed in the raw scar across the face 
of Europe, and the malignant pustule that has 
burst at last formed itself at the far eastern end. 
Here, in the Hhineland and Westphalia, grew 
monstrously the wealth, the potency, and the 
material force that, made operative by the cold 
philosophy and the supreme efficiency of Prussia, 
have made possible, and even inevitable, the 
supreme attempt to bring to an end the out- 
worn and discredited ideals and methods of ten 
centuries of Christian civilisation, and establish 



COAL AND IRON 153 

in unquestioned supremacy the ideals and the 
methods that have fought hiddenly for dominion 
in Charleroi and Essen, in Leeds and Birmingham, 
in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York. 

Coal and iron. When the first bituminous 
lump blazed unexpectedly on the hearth of the 
amazed cottager, the iron that had been man's 
servant for so long, stirred in its first waking to 
mastership, a mastery achieved at last, incredible 
in its degree, incredible in its potentiality. Crea- 
tures of its own, and allies brought into being 
before or since, but now taking a new force and 
applied with new motives, gunpowder, steam, 
electricity, join with it in plausibly offering their 
services as beneficent agents toward the anni- 
hilating of life; and, as agent and controller of 
the vast hegemony, wealth, desired above all 
things, powerful beyond all things, after many 
days "Lord of the World." 

Nations and men have tried for world-mastery, 
time out of mind, relying on brute strength of 
muscle, on craft of brain, on indomitable will, 
and everlasting fear. Have tried and failed — 
after a little — and the empires of Alexander, 
Csesar, Charlemagne, Louis, Philip, Napoleon 
have crumbled and become a memory. Failure 



154 HEART OF EUROPE 

was inevitable for strength of arm, of brain, of 
will, was not, and could not be made, exclusive 
possession of any race or people, nor could terror 
be confined within territorial limits; in the end 
revolt; the rising of new tribes, intrusion of fear, 
weakness, degeneration amongst the victors, their 
ominous evanishment from amongst the con- 
quered. 

But how now, with these new aids, these un- 
tried forces and potentialities? Suppose that 
the unestimated energy of a million years, stored 
in the bowels of the earth, be applied to the dull 
iron and to the harnessing of the mysterious 
electrical force, under the stimulus of Will eman- 
cipated from the hampering influence of a dis- 
credited religion and a superstitious ethic; sup- 
pose a new demiurge be created, given supreme 
direction over soul and mind and body, and 
named Efficiency, and suppose for two generations 
the energy employed blindly and to no con- 
sistent end by dull nations, half-hearted in their 
devotion and still bound by the memory of dying 
creeds and moribund old morals, be applied by the 
highest and most self-sacrificing intelligence to the 
creation of a supreme, perfect, and absolutely co- 
ordinated engine that, at the well-conceived mo- 



COAL AND IRON 155 

ment, shall be brought to bear without pity and 
without pause on the inferior nations of the globe. 
What then? 

The answer is still withheld, for the trial is in 
process. It was a magnificent conception, and 
inevitable, for the great sequence of spiritual and 
material happenings that has followed from the 
first weakening of Christian civilisation and Cath- 
olic culture at the very beginning of the fourteenth 
century was bound to have issue in its logical and 
dramatic crest, and in the final test of its efficiency. 
There is nothing half-way in its effort, nothing in- 
differently accomplished or insecure at any point. 
Essen, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin have forgotten noth- 
ing, failed in nothing. Every material agency, 
potential on the earth and under, has been de- 
veloped, harnessed, and applied ; every hampering 
stumbling-block of an old righteousness, an old 
religion, an old philosophy is removed; coal, 
iron, steam, electricity, chemistry are built up 
into a great and puissant unity, made operative 
by the wealth they themselves have created and 
energised by the dynamic force of intensive in- 
tellect no longer hampered by fear of God or 
charity for man, or an ancient sense of honour 
that came out of feudalism, the Crusades, and a 



156 HEART OF EUROPE 

Church that held the state in thrall and should 
have perished with the things she had made. 

The mystery of the "Sin against the Holy 
Ghost," the mystery of "Antichrist" are mys- 
teries no longer, but clear writings on an open 
page; blazing words on the walls of the banquet 
hall where the feast has broken up in sudden and 
searching terror. 

Coal and iron. These territories are now the 
centres of greatest conflict: Poland, Galicia, and 
the Scar of Europe in the west. Each is the land 
of coal and iron. In the east the contest sweeps 
back and forth in Poland to rob Russia of her 
mines and manufactures, and add them to the 
resources of Germany; in the south to preserve 
to Austria the coal and iron and oil of Galicia; 
in the west to gain from France the coal and iron 
of Champagne, Artois, Picardy, as the coal and 
iron of Belgium were gained in the beginning at 
the price of paper treaties and a negligible honour, 
or to deprive Germany of the coal and iron that 
are the foundations of her empire (actual and 
potential) in the Rhineland and Westphalia. Was 
there any drama of Sophocles, Euripides, Shake- 
speare, Goethe that matched the sombre theat- 
ricalism of life itself ? Here in the west, far back 



COAL AND IRON 157 

in the Middle Ages, was the first great centre of 
manufacture and trade, Bruges, Ghent, Arras, 
great cities and world markets when London was 
a little river town, Paris a village, Berlin a fron- 
tier fort on the raw edge of a savage and heathen 
Prussia. Then later, after this first (and dif- 
ferent) industrial civilisation had passed, came 
a new manifestation, and from Lille to Essen ap- 
peared the materialisation of a new madness, 
while Bruges and Courtrai and Aix were for- 
gotten, with all they stood for, and other centres 
grew up — black, roaring, uncouth, but for men 
admirable and desired far beyond the restored 
churches and desecrated abbeys, the schools and 
universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, 
the decaying art and the vanished ideals of 
Fecamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of 
Aix and Treves and Cologne. And now the Frank- 
enstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and 
through the coal-fields and over the forges and 
factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, 
devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here 
the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet 
bring redemption, release, and restoration. 

What has been in the immediate past needs 
no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Man- 



158 HEART OF EUROPE 

chester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is 
sufficient to itself. What is now is equally com- 
mon to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their 
blood-stained ruin are a part of the common con- 
sciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the 
moment are, other cities and other regions, for- 
gotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is 
not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well 
worth a study, partly for what they are, partly 
for what they signify, partly for what they may 
forecast for a future beyond the present cata- 
clysm. 

There is hardly a more absorbingly interest- 
ing portion of France, historically, artistically, or 
picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, 
Compiegne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three 
great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France — 
Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III — its fine old 
towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves 
and terraced paths; its great Forest of Compiegne; 
and only a few miles away on one hand or the 
other, chateaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle- 
fields of the significance of Crecy. It is all fought 
over now and may be again; no one knows how 
much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was 
a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious 



COAL AND IRON 159 

and balanced past, not in its great churches alone 
but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey 
houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for 
already the creeping desolation of industrialism 
had reached close, working always down from 
the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. 
Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in 
smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of 
gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manu- 
facturing centre — this, that was once the dowry 
of Mary Stuart. 

North we enter into a general darkness, but on 
our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders 
and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of 
an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside 
the area of "great natural resources," we may 
pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to 
be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the 
army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but 
touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city 
that gave a vision, better than almost any other 
in France, of what cities were in this region at 
the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, 
utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in 
the Revolution and continued under the empire, 
when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral 



160 HEART OF EUROPE 

was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished 
by Prussian shells. 

Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful 
history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, con- 
tinuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who be- 
came the first Count of Arras; then being halved 
between the Count of Flanders and the King of 
France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, 
passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to 
Louis de Male of Flemish fame, abandoned to 
the Emperor, won back by France; then ac- 
quiring the sinister distinction of having pro- 
duced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to 
its end at the hands of the German hosts. What 
Arras must have been before the Revolution we 
can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, 
its Chapelle des Ardents, and its "Pyramid of 
the Holy Candle" added to its surviving town 
hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its 
miraculously preserved streets and squares lined 
with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it 
must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The 
cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to 
the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the 
"pyramid," were models of mediaeval art in its 
richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, 



COAL AND IRON 161 

a human demon and apostate priest, who or- 
ganised a "terror" of his own in his city and has 
gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes. 

Both the destroyed monuments were votive 
offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her mi- 
raculous intervention in the case of a fearful 
plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of 
preservation being a certain holy candle, the 
melted wax from which was effective in preserv- 
ing the life of all it touched. The pyramid was 
a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety 
feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a master- 
piece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, 
unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished 
except a few relics preserved, together with that 
most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet 
of St. Thomas a Becket, in the modern cathedral 
which Berlin has just announced has been com- 
pletely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire. 

Until its recent destruction, Arras was one of 
the few territorially French towns in this region 
that could and did take one back into the at- 
mosphere of the pre-coal-and-iron era of Europe, 
though with a difference. The fine vigour and 
riotous life of the Renaissance, the gaiety and 
spontaneousness of medievalism were gone, with 



162 HEART OF EUROPE 

the colour and gold of the carved and painted 
shrines and houses, the fanciful costumes, the 
alert civic life; and instead was a grey shadow, 
a slowly dissolving memory. Still the pale simula- 
crum could stimulate the imagination, as the rose 
jar renews the memory of the rose. Now the 
jar is shattered and the scented leaves are trod- 
den in the red mire, and we must make our way 
across the frontier if we are to find and enjoy 
what once Arras could in a measure give. God 
grant we may always be able to do so, and that 
Audenaarde and Tournai, Bruges and Malines, 
and Courtrai, with the still little villages in be- 
tween, may remain to us after coal and iron have 
achieved their perfect work and been replaced 
in that position in life to which it pleased God 
to call them, so surrendering the more dominating 
place to which man had called them in his turn. 
Of Ypres and Dixmude it is better to say little. 
Of the first of these, and its vanished glory, the 
solemn and single great Cloth Hall, I have said 
an inadequate something, but there was also St. 
Martin's, once a cathedral, with its delicate type 
of Gothic, its rich Renaissance woodwork, its 
tombs and screens and treasures of ecclesiastical 
art; there were its old guild-houses and its quaint 



COAL AND IRON 163 

dwellings, carved and gabled and with wonderful 
old brickwork. And in Dixmude there was the 
Church of St. Nicholas with its jube, or rood- 
loft, as gorgeous a piece of flamboyant art as 
one could find anywhere in Belgium or France. 
All this is gone, but a little farther on, behind the 
present battle lines, are more wonderful cities 
still — or are at this writing, in July, 1915. 

This little Flanders, from the Scheldt to the 
sea, was a veritable garden of dreams. Nieuport, 
Furnes, Ypres, Dixmude, Courtrai, Tournai, 
Bruges, Ghent, Audenaarde — all are haunted by 
infinite old memories, and most of them have 
preserved their souls through seclusion and com- 
mercial oblivion, but around and between lie 
endless little villages of delicate old houses, grey 
Gothic churches that have not been secularised 
or abandoned (for Flanders always was a Catholic 
country), gardens, slow canals and brooks under 
their low stone bridges, and an ingratiating quiet 
that gives the lie to the progressive, practical, 
efficient, and wealthy strip of inordinate activity 
that "disquieteth itself in vain" from Lille to 
Liege through Mons and Courcelles, Charleroi 
and Namur. 

As the old names come forward again in rumours 



164 HEART OF EUROPE 

and reports from the front, in death lists and 
hideous narratives of outrage and destruction, 
indestructible memories, dormant for thirty years, 
take form and shape again, and daily the gentle 
charm of a forgotten land becomes living, and 
the dull fear of an unpredicable and sinister fu- 
ture grows more ominous and intense. There is 
no other land quite like it; no place where the 
old has been spared by the new to such a degree, 
and where the old has remained so altogether 
lovely. 

Of course Bruges is the Holy of Holies in this 
sanctuary of lost ideals, but on the way stop to 
consider the outer ring of a better kind of for- 
tresses that circle her inner citadel. 

Nieuport, Dixmude, and Ypres once held their 
stations from the sea to the Lys, but their ram- 
parts and bastions were not proof against the 
siege-guns of Essen and they have fallen. Next 
to the east and farther down the Lys, is Courtrai, 
under whose walls in 1302 was fought that battle 
of the burghers of Flanders against the French, 
when 1,200 of the flower of French knighthood, 
not to speak of the men-at-arms, were slain, and 
600 golden spurs were gathered from the field 
and hung in triumph in the abbey church. 




A CHIMNEY-PIECE FROM COURTRAJ 



COAL AND IRON 165 

Once a great city, Courtrai had recovered 
something of its ancient wealth and activity, but 
this had injured it less than one might suppose, 
and it was still a fair town, with many trees and 
gardens, and its air of pride in a fine past. There 
were many churches, confused in their sequent 
styles, but full of charm, with rich screens of 
Gothic lace work, old wall paintings, and in one 
— Notre Dame — Vandyck's "Elevation of the 
Cross," a great picture in every way. Then there 
was the Hotel de Ville, late Gothic of the kind 
that lingered so long in Flanders after it had per- 
ished elsewhere, with sumptuous chimneypieces of 
fantastic carvings and crowded statues, and finally 
the matchless old bridge with its three round 
arches and its enormous towers at either end with 
their high extinguisher roofs; altogether a good 
old town, so self-respecting and sane that it could 
achieve a new prosperity without sacrificing its 
old ideals. 

South of Courtrai lies Tournai, on either side 
the Scheldt, the last outpost of an old culture 
against a new civilisation, for beyond lies Le 
Borinage, the Great Scar, where none would ven- 
ture unless under compulsion. Like Courtrai it 
holds its own bravely against coal and iron, pre- 



166 HEART OF EUROPE 

serving its fine old buildings, and largely con- 
fining itself to its traditional weaving and em- 
broidery, much of which is still the product of 
hand-looms and deft fingers. All day the black 
coal barges slide down the river, coming from 
the inner darkness to disappear in the outer dark- 
ness, leaving the city itself clean and sweet, but 
prosperous withal, and manifesting a tendency 
toward boulevards that prompts both regret and 
apprehension. 

An ancient capital of the Merovings, a great 
city in the fifteenth century, four times the size 
of such struggling communities as London, be- 
sieged from time to time by pretty much every 
state or faction of North Europe, Tournai is full 
of pregnant records of every age for fifteen cen- 
turies. Toward the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury the grave of King Childebert himself was dis- 
covered, containing innumerable remains of royal 
vestments and regalia — three hundred golden bees 
from his dalmatic, medals, coins, portions of a 
sceptre, sword, axe, javelin, together with the 
great seal-ring of the King himself and, as well, 
vestiges of the skeleton and trappings of his war- 
horse, killed and buried with him. Unfortunately 
these precious relics were seized and taken to 



COAL AND IRON 167 

Paris, where most of them were later stolen and 
never recovered. It was from the gold bees, how- 
ever, that Napoleon derived his idea of sub- 
stituting this emblem for the traditional lilies of 
France. Now the lilies are faded and the bees 
are dust, but a resurrection is possible for either, 
and out of the war one or the other may come to 
a new day — or will both yield to the Rampant 
Lion from a blood-stained and forever-glorious 
flag, blowing now, though in exile, amongst the 
banners of Europe, equal in dignity and first in 
honour ? 

The Cathedral of Our Lady of Tournai is far 
less known than its peculiar importance and its 
peculiar beauty demand. It is a curious accre- 
tion and plexus of styles, from the middle of the 
eleventh to the end of the fourteenth century, 
with an incongruous but beautiful rood-screen 
of the Renaissance. Cruciform, and of great size 
(425 feet in length), it has the apsidal transepts of 
the Rhenish style, each with its columned ambu- 
latory; a central tower with high pointed roof, 
also Rhenish (and English) and, as well, four slim 
surrounding towers, two to each transept, as at 
Laon, where they are not all complete, and at 
Reims, where they never rose above the nave cor- 



168 HEART OF EUROPE 

nice. All this is in a fine, strong, simple, round- 
arched transition style, far superior to anything on 
the Rhine, and at least equal to Noyon and Paris. 
The four tall towers are equal in size and general 
design, but run from a consistent Romanesque to 
a straightforward Gothic in detail, the effect being 
particularly vital and interesting. The enormous 
choir of late and very delicate mediaeval design, 
having been begun in the last quarter of the thir- 
teenth and finished in the middle of the fourteenth 
century, is one of the few Gothic things one re- 
grets, for while it is very beautiful in itself, it has 
eliminated what was probably a strikingly effective 
Romanesque choir, while its towering mass crushes 
all the rest of the church and makes it a rather 
shapeless composition. 

The cathedral has suffered constantly and at 
the hands of many kinds of unscrupulous vandals. 
The "Reformers" in the sixteenth century pil- 
laged it and wrecked its gilded shrines and its 
ancient glass; the Revolutionists continued the 
dread work in the eighteenth century, and a hun- 
dred years later blundering efforts to reinforce 
it by crude masses of masonry were succeeded by 
equally blundering efforts at restoration. It has, 
however, preserved and gathered together many 



COAL AND IRON 169 

treasures of Catholic art, including chasubles of 
St. Thomas a Becket, Flemish tapestries, ivory- 
carvings, embroidered altar frontals, metal work, 
and mediaeval missals. 

There are many other fine old churches in 
Tournai — St. Jacques, St. Quentin, St. Nicholas, 
St. Brice — all with elements of interest, while the 
ancient Cloth Hall contains a most valuable col- 
lection of mediaeval art-work of all kinds, and 
the older streets still preserve fine dwellings and 
guild-houses of the Middle Ages and early Renais- 
sance. 

Audenaarde is all old, and it lies some five and 
twenty miles down the slow-winding Scheldt on 
its roundabout and unhurried way to Ghent and 
Antwerp and the sea. Once also it was a great 
city, now it is a village of six or seven thousand 
souls, for it has fortunately never recovered its 
prosperity under the new and unhandsome con- 
ditions that marked the nineteenth century, as 
happened in the case of Brussels and Antwerp 
and Ghent. In earlier days it was famous, 
like Arras, for its tapestries, and many of those 
exquisite fifteenth-century masterpieces that are 
now exiled in alien museums where they do not 
belong, but where at least their value is appre- 



170 HEART OF EUROPE 

ciated and estimated at almost their weight in 
gold, came from its looms. Tapestries are made 
here no more, nor in any other place, for their 
art was of a peculiar subtlety that, even if it finds 
appreciation amongst stray connoisseurs and cura- 
tors, is as far beyond the powers of the present 
day and generation as the glass of Chartres or 
the sculptures of Reims. Linen and cotton weav- 
ing and the brewing of beer have taken the place 
of tapestries in Audenaarde, but the old town it- 
self is little harmed thereby. 

From the large and pious and opulent days of 
the later Middle Ages, there remain in Audenaarde 
a very splendid great hall and two equally great 
churches of rather unusual value. The hall is early 
sixteenth century, very rich and equally graceful, 
with a slender tower and spire, ending in a great 
crown as did the now-shattered tower of Arras. 
Its rooms are very splendid, with big carved 
chimneypieces of the most elaborate design, and 
with its small size and scrupulous detail it ranks 
with Bruges and Arras and in advance of the 
more ambitious creations of Brussels and Ghent. 

The two remaining churches of Audenaarde, Ste. 
Walburga and Notre Dame, have much distinc- 
tion and architectural value, particularly Notre 



COAL AND IRON 171 

Dame, which was Cistercian and is a surprisingly 
pure example of the reserved and ascetic Gothic 
which always marked the buildings of this order — 
which it largely created as a matter of fact. Ste. 
Walburga is quite different, with its Romanesque 
choir of very modest proportions, its ambitious 
and overshadowing nave of the fifteenth century, 
and its unfinished transepts showing where the 
great scheme of rebuilding, undertaken when it 
was too late and religion was already a waning 
force, had been abandoned. There has been too 
much restoration in the case of all these works 
of admirable art, and the ancient atmosphere is 
pretty well gone, but they are noble still, in spite 
of the nervous and mechanical attentions of archae- 
ologists and architects and other well-meaning but 
misguided people. 



IX 

A TALE OF THREE CITIES 

STILL farther to the north, at the confluence 
of the Scheldt and the Lys, is Ghent, the 
proud and turbulent metropolis of the fifteenth 
century, the city-state that was so preposterously 
democratic it could never get along with its neigh- 
bours, nor even with itself; the city of De Con- 
ninck and Breidel and the Van Artevelds, of sud- 
den and heroic courage, of irresponsible turnings 
from one side to the other, and a characteristic 
vacillation in public policy that kept it always in 
hot water and was in the end its undoing; the 
place of strange old churches and wonderful 
houses; the shrine of marvellous pictures and one 
of them perhaps, what it has been called, the 
greatest picture in the world. 

To Ghent, over which lay for centuries the 
oblivion that came upon all the cities of Flanders 
after they lost their independence and fell into 
the hands of the unscrupulous princes and states 
of the Renaissance, one following another with 

172 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 173 

variety of oppression but no cessation thereof, 
has come a new vitality. It is as great a city now 
as then, counting a population of well over 200,- 
000, while Bruges has no more than a quarter of 
this number. Providentially, it has suffered less 
than might have been feared by this accession 
of prosperity; its wonderful churches and tall 
towers, its quays with their serried lines of high 
gabled houses, its great castle of the Counts of 
Flanders, its winding streets and tortuous ca- 
nals lined with ancient and lovely dwellings and 
spanned by little stone bridges, all tell even now 
for almost their full value; and though the city 
is quite metropolitan in its cleanness and well- 
being, with fine new streets and bridges and 
shops, the spell of a great antiquity is over it, 
and the new follows the old with conscientious 
effort and delightful delicacy of feeling. If an 
old city must gain a new lease of life, let it be 
after the fashion of Ghent. 

Here is an old treasure-house full of wonders, 
and it can be touched upon lightly, if at all, for 
it demands a volume to itself. It has a dozen 
churches, all of the deepest interest; the Cathe- 
dral of St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. 
Jacques, standing to the front. All suffered 



174 HEART OF EUROPE 

from the Protestants and the French Revolution, 
and some from the mishandling of restorers, but 
they retain their individuality, which is very 
marked, for one and all are very local variants 
of the styles one finds elsewhere; they are of 
Ghent and of no other place. Brick is used 
widely, as elsewhere in Flanders, either by itself 
or mingled with stone; and it is used with that 
intelligence, so rare in modern times, that in- 
dicates the possibility of adapting a style to the 
materials through which it is expressed. Of 
course, then art was as living a thing as religion 
and the realities of liberty, whereas now they all 
fall in the category of those fictions that please 
while they do not persuade — which makes all the 
difference in the world. All Flanders is a lesson 
in the use of brick, and as it is used here in St. 
Nicholas, and in the houses of the Quai aux 
Herbes, as it was used in lost Louvain, in deso- 
lated Ypres, in battered Malines, it was a study in 
good art, a lesson in the history of human cul- 
ture, a demonstration of the perfect adaptation of 
modest means to a very noble end. 

Ghent must have been a city of indescribable 
beauty about the middle of the sixteenth century 
before its dark days began and one scourge after 




A CANAL IN MALINES 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 175 

another followed the Reformers with their com- 
bination of dull brutality, insane self-sufficiency, 
and savage fury of destruction. Even now the 
group of towers, St. Bavon, St. Nicholas, and the 
belfry with its "Great Bell Roland" — though the 
original spires are gone and the belfry has further 
suffered the indignity of an extinguisher cap of 
iron — gives some faint idea of what must have 
been before coal and iron came, first to destroy 
and then most hideously to re-create. So also 
does the towering old castle give a hint, whether 
you see it from the Place Ste. Pharailde or from 
the canal, with its great buttresses lifting out of 
the water; so does the unfinished but sumptuous 
Hotel de Ville with its fretted bays and balconied 
turrets; so do the beautiful ruins of the ancient 
abbey shrouded in vines and trees. Life in a 
mediaeval city such as this could have left little 
to be desired so far as beauty of environment was 
concerned, and when this contained within itself 
unspoliated, unrestored churches that were in use 
all the time and meant something besides a 
seventh-day respectability, and a great bell in a 
tall tower, around whose rim were the words, 
"My name is Roland. When I toll there is fire; 
when I ring there is victory in Flanders," it is 



176 HEART OF EUROPE 

easy to see how men could and did paint such 
pictures as "The Adoration of the Lamb That Was 
Slain." 

This, with the other great pictures in Flanders, 
will be considered in another chapter. It is the 
central art-treasure of the cathedral, the pride of 
the Netherlands, and one of the wonders of paint- 
ing of the world. 

Past tragic Termonde — a name and a deed 
never to be forgotten so long as history endures — 
now only a desert of broken walls and a place 
of unquiet ghosts, the Scheldt goes down to Ant- 
werp, the last of the inner circle of impotent de- 
fences of the eternal things that cannot resist, 
against the passing things that are omnipotent 
during their little day. In the sixteenth century it 
was the greatest and richest city in Europe; now, 
with its 400,000 inhabitants, it is double its for- 
mer size but numerically counts for little beside 
the insane aggregations that call themselves cities 
and are the work of the last century of misdirected 
and evanescent energy. Its greatness culminated 
in 1550, and then came the sequence of catas- 
trophes that reduced it to material insignificance 
for three hundred years, the Protestant Reforma- 
tion, with its savage destruction in 1566 of churches 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 177 

and monasteries, and of what they stood for as 
well; the Spanish occupation, with Alva's enormi- 
ties in 1576, when the more industrious and able 
citizens were driven into England, and the city 
itself burned; the winning away by the Dutch 
of its old command of commerce; the closing of 
the river by the Peace of Westphalia, and finally 
the devastating storm of the French Revolution 
which destroyed pretty much of anything that 
had been left. By this time the population had 
fallen to 40,000, but under Napoleon a short- 
lived recovery began, which was brought to an 
end by the revolution of 1830, and it was not 
until the middle of the century that a more 
lasting development was initiated. 

Antwerp is a good enough modern town, as 
these go, but its disasters have robbed it of all 
its ancient quality, and even the cathedral has 
the air of being out of place. Great as it is, it is 
not a masterpiece, or even an exemplar of its 
many Gothic variants at their best. Its unusual 
width and number of aisles, its great height and 
its forest of columns give a certain impressive- 
ness and a very beautiful play of light and shade, 
while its single tower is quite wonderful in its 
slender grace and its intricate and delicate scaf- 



178 HEART OF EUROPE 

folding. Its one famous picture is the over- 
praised "Descent from the Cross" of Rubens, 
painted while he was under Italian influence 
and therefore, if quite uncharacteristic, nobler 
and more self-contained than the products of 
his maturity when he had become wholly him- 
self. 

There are one or two other churches of frag- 
mentary value, the unique museum made out of 
the old dwelling and printing-office of Chris- 
topher Plantin, with its stores of mediaeval and 
Renaissance industrial art, and the Royal Museum 
where there are more admirable examples of the 
painting of Flanders, Brabant, and the Nether- 
lands than are to be found gathered together in 
any other one place. For critical, or in a limited 
way, artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek 
by jowl, of innumerable works of art collected 
from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries, 
has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from 
its original and intended surroundings tells for 
its full value. One wonders sometimes whether 
a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a pic- 
ture-gallery is the most biting indictment of 
contemporary culture and artistic sense; cer- 
tainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 179 

presents powerful claims that are not lightly to 
be disregarded. 

So, from the dunes of the North Sea around 
to the wide estuary of the Scheldt, the ring of 
defences is complete, and in the midst like a 
citadel lies Bruges, the Dream City, preserving, 
guarding, and reverencing its dreams. 

I knew Bruges first in 1886 when I seem to 
remember its old walls, when its new buildings 
were few and unobjectionable, and when the 
tourist — English, German, American — was as 
much of a novelty as he was an anachronism. I 
am told now that the walls have gone, and the 
boulevards and architects' buildings, and the 
tourists have come in; have come in hosts, with 
all their destructive possibilities, but I can think 
only of the old Bruges, still, meditative, serene; 
a town Maxfield Parish might have designed, but 
impossible elsewhere except as a survival, by some 
providential miracle of beneficence, from the heart 
of the Middle Ages. 

This is not to say that Bruges has survived in- 
tact. Hurled into the midst of the maelstrom of 
chaos that characterised the Renaissance in all its 
political aspects, she was ruined utterly between 
Maximilian of Austria, the Calvinists, and the 



180 HEART OF EUROPE 

Duke of Alva. War and pillage, massacre, bribery, 
treason, the rack marked the advance in culture 
and civilisation beyond the dark days of medie- 
valism. What the Austrian spared the Protestant 
devoured, while the Spaniard gleaned the crumbs 
that remained. Bruges, that great city, proud, 
rich, and beautiful above all cities of the North, 
counted now a population of a scant 30,000, hope- 
less, abandoned, poverty-stricken. 

The greatest ruin was wrought by one Balfour, 
a creature in the pay of William of Orange, who 
in 1578 captured the city and held it for six 
years, during which time the Catholic religion 
was prohibited, the bishop was imprisoned, all 
priests were either driven into exile or tortured 
and then burned at the stake, while churches 
were destroyed, turned into stables, sacked and 
desecrated, and more great pictures, statues, 
shrines, windows, sacred vessels, and vestments 
were destroyed than have been miraculously 
preserved. Every religious house in the vicinity 
was completely expunged, including the vast 
Cistercian monastery of Coxyde, the most glorious 
church in Flanders; and its wide-spread gardens, 
fields, and orchards regained from the dunes by 
centuries of labour, reverted to their original 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 181 

estate, and desolation took the place of benefi- 
cent and hard-won fertility. 

Out of this reign of terror came as some com- 
pensation the saving of Bruges — or what was 
left of it. In 1560 the Pope had made the city 
an episcopal see, on the urging of Philip II, and 
after Balfour had met a well-merited, but too 
sudden and merciful, death, the exiled and plun- 
dered orders took refuge within its walls, building 
new and humbler quarters for themselves and hos- 
pitals and almshouses for the miserable citizens. 
The Church took the place of commerce, and 
under its care some degree of life came back to 
the ruined city; and the quality it then took on, 
of a community of religious houses, institutions 
of charity and mercy, and old churches restored 
again to their proper uses, it has never lost. 

Toward the end of the seventeenth and all 
through the eighteenth century the slow destruc- 
tion of old beauty went on, though with a dif- 
ferent impulse. Now it was the unescapable 
vandalism of ignorance and degraded taste that 
marked the time; old windows that had escaped 
the Calvinists were pulled out so that a better 
light might fall on a new altar, since it was "such 
an admirable imitation of marble," even as hap- 



182 HEART OF EUROPE 

pened in Chartres, where some of the matchless 
windows were contemptuously cast into a ditch 
to reveal the tawdry splendours of the lamen- 
table high altar and imitation marble of the choir 
which represented the enlightened intelligence 
of the eighteenth-century canons. The sixteenth 
century was bad enough, but one wonders some- 
times how any continental culture survived the 
eighteenth century. 

Later, when the nineteenth century came to 
crown with perfect achievement the arduous but 
incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly and 
barbarous houses took the place of only too many 
of the beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and 
finally the wonderful old walls were ruthlessly 
razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in 
spite of it all Bruges survives, and more com- 
pletely than any other city of the North, for it is 
farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, 
and if war passes it by, it may still remain an 
oasis, a sanctuary in the desert. 

The beauty of Bruges is incomparable and 
unique. Threaded by winding canals, crossed 
by innumerable old stone bridges, where pink- 
and-grey walls, tall gables, spired turrets, leaning 
fronts of mullioned windows rise from old stone- 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 183 

paved quays and garden walls hung with vines 
and backed by tree tops; cut by narrow streets 
of ancient houses, with old churches and convents 
and chapels on every hand and with slender 
towers lifting over quaint market-places and 
little squares and sudden gardens, it is a con- 
tinuous and ever-varying and never-exhausting 
delight that, so far as I know, finds its rival only 
in Venice. A city that has shrunken a little within 
its walls is always more beautiful than one that has 
burst them and is steadily intruding into the flee- 
ing countryside. That is the difference between 
the advance of man and that of nature. Ghent, 
Rome, Nuremberg are kernels of sweetness sur- 
rounded by a monstrously expanding rind that is 
exceeding bitter, but Carcassonne, Rothenburg, 
Siena, Bruges are so wholly different there is no 
possibility of comparison. When the houses of 
an old town seem to huddle a little more closely 
together, while superfluous walls fall away and 
the tide of green comes lapping on already moss- 
grown walls to cover and obliterate the traces 
man has left of his less successful efforts, then you 
have something approaching a perfect environ- 
ment, particularly if, as here, there are innumer- 
able and endless treasures of the best that man 



184 HEART OF EUROPE 

can do, now carefully preserved, and growing 
better the nearer nature comes to touch them 
with her wand of magic. 

Architecturally, Bruges is fifteenth century with 
a singular consistency — when it isn't of a century 
later or, and less conspicuously, of the fourteenth 
century; not that it matters much, it all hangs 
together because it is all of one mood and one 
impulse and one race. Its Hotel de Ville, one of 
the perfect things in architecture, I have spoken 
of elsewhere; its churches, at least six of them, 
are each engaging in a different way, and each 
contains treasures of endless pictures, wood carv- 
ing, metal work, vestments, gathered from ruined 
monasteries and churches to take the place of 
the greater treasures pillaged and destroyed by 
the Calvinists. Our Lady's Church, with its 
curiously beautiful tower and its gem-like porch; 
the cathedral with its ugly modern tower and 
its fine interior with all its pictures and treasures 
of " dinanderie " ; the Chapel of the Holy Blood, 
still fantastic and charming in spite of its suf- 
ferings at the hands of the French Revolutionists; 
St. Jacques, St. Gilles, and the Church of the 
Holy Sepulchre with its noble tomb of Count 
Baldwin of Jerusalem and his wife. 




THE BELFRY OF BRUGES 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 185 

Then there are all the old guild-houses, hospi- 
tals, convents, monasteries, and the rows and rows 
of fine old dwellings, each a model of personal 
and curiously contented architectural art, but, 
after all, Bruges is not Bruges because of its 
single buildings, or all of them together, or be- 
cause of its pictures and its metal work and 
wood carving. It is Bruges because of its un- 
earthly beauty of canals and gardens, of endless 
sudden compositions of lovely forms and lines 
and silhouettes; because of its still atmosphere 
of old days and better ways, and because it is a 
place where religion no longer appears as an ac- 
cessory but takes its place even in these modern 
times as a constant, daily, poignant, and personal 
influence. 

Already this living charm had begun to exert 
itself over a wider and wider field, and when the 
war came there were more than 4,000 English 
and Americans who had taken up their residence 
there, drawn by its subtle charm and by what this 
stood for once, and stands for now. When the 
King is back in Brussels again, and real life begins 
once more, who knows but that the spirit of 
Bruges may find itself dominant over the spirit 
(has it a spirit?) of Charleroi, not only in Flan- 



186 HEART OF EUROPE 

ders and Belgium and Europe, but throughout 
the world, for "the old order changeth, giving 
place to new," and the "new" is also, and un- 
mistakably, the old, preserved as here in Bruges 
for better days, when through suffering and ruin 
man comes into his own again, and sees once 
more what is, what is not, worth while. 

In Brabant were once other centres of old 
memories: Maastricht, Liege, Huy, and Namur; 
Dinant, Lou vain, and Malines. None of them 
remains, for across Brabant runs the black scar 
that has transformed the cities of the Sambre 
and the Meuse into smoking anvils, where iron 
is hammered out into efficiency and coal is torn 
from the earth and burned in consuming fires 
to the same end; for across Brabant runs the 
red scar that efficiency has blazed like a trail of 
enduring flame, never to be forgotten or forgiven 
so long as man remains on earth; a portent and a 
horror to all generations in scecula sceculorum. 
Dinant, Louvain, Malines; yes, and Tirlemont, 
Aerschot, Wavre and the innumerable other names 
that are uttered below the breath as signifying 
things that cannot be spoken but never will be for- 
gotten, things that give one at last to understand 
the stern necessity of the once discredited, but 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 187 

now grateful, doctrines of hell and of eternal dam- 
nation in the Christian scheme of the universe. 

Dinant, whose fame in the fifteenth century 
for the making of wonderful works of art in metal, 
gave the name "dinanderie" to this admirable 
art — Dinant, crouched under the castle-crowned 
cliffs of the Meuse, with its quaint church, has 
gone now, and gone also is Louvain, all but its 
Hotel de Ville which is more like a pyx or a reli- 
quary, or some other work of "dinanderie," than 
a real building. The destruction of Louvain 
needs no description, for its fires have burned 
its story indelibly into human consciousness. 
We know only too well how its university was 
destroyed, with its priceless library and its an- 
cient and unique manuscripts; how the great 
and beautiful Church of St. Pierre was swept by 
flames and left a hopeless ruin; how its streets 
were absorbed, one after another, in the roaring 
conflagration, covering with their debris the stains 
of massacre and pillage. Of Malines we know 
less, nor shall until the great cloud rolls back, but 
there was much there to lose, and some of this 
we know has been lost while more may follow. 
In spite of the altars to coal and iron outside the 
old cincture of the town, Malines itself was a 



188 HEART OF EUROPE 

gentle and lovely old place, gathered around its 
great Church of St. Rombaut with its incredible 
tower. A town of old houses and still canals in 
strangely poetic combination, a little Bruges with 
a finer church than any the perfect Flemish city 
could boast. The church itself is of a vigorous 
type of the earliest fourteenth-century architec- 
ture, but the great tower, which was planned as 
the highest and most splendid spire in the world, 
though it completed only three hundred and 
twenty of its projected five hundred and fifty 
feet, is fifteenth century, and as perfect an ex- 
ample of late Gothic at its best as may be found 
anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable 
in its combination of majesty, brilliancy of de- 
sign, and inconceivable intricacy of detail. The 
exuberance that marks the flamboyant art of 
France is here controlled and directed into the 
most excellent channels, and if ever it had been 
completed it must have taken its place as the 
most beautiful tower in the world. As it is, it 
ranks in its own way with the southern fleche of 
Chartres and Giotto's Tower in Florence, and 
more one cannot say. 

Information is not forthcoming as to how far 
it already has been wrecked; it is said that the 



A TALE OF THREE CITIES 189 

glimmering pinnacles and niches of its amazing 
buttresses have suffered severely from shell-fire, 
and that its carillon, the finest in Belgium, has 
been destroyed; if nothing worse follows, the 
world may yet see its visionary spire take actual 
form at last, in the gratitude of a people for the 
passing from themselves, and from the world, of 
the shadow of death. 

Inevitably, when one thinks of Malines, Lou- 
vain, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Reims, there comes 
the suggestion of possible restorations, concretely 
expressed already by German savants and ar- 
chaeologists incapable of comprehending the dif- 
ference between art and imitation, and as some 
palliation for the evils that have been done. It 
is a thought that must resolutely be put aside. 
As I said in speaking of Reims, if enough remains 
to be made habitable by simple patching and 
protection, let this be done by all means, but 
without a foot of false carving or glass or sculp- 
ture. Build other churches if you like, and as 
you must, and perhaps on the old general lines, 
though elsewhere, but let us have no more a Pierre- 
fond or a Mt. St. Michael. What is gone is gone 
irrevocably, and its shells and shards are too valu- 
able in their eternal teaching to be obliterated 



190 HEART OF EUROPE 

by well-meant schemes of rehabilitation. When 
a whole town passes, as Ypres and Lou vain and 
Arras, then as it fell so let it lie. A kindly nature 
will slowly turn these bleak piles of fallen masonry 
into beautiful memorials, clothing them with 
grass and vines and flowers and trees. Let them 
stand so for ever, a memorial to the dead and a 
warning to man in his pride of life and insolence 
of will; and for the new cities, let them rise as 
beautifully as may be alongside, but not over, 
the graves of a dead era. Glastonbury and Ju- 
mieges, in their solemn and noble ruin, tell their 
story to ears that at last are disposed to listen, 
and the story of Reims and Lou vain, with the 
same moral at its end, must be told eternally 
after the same fashion. 



X 

MARGARET OF MALINES 

THE historians always call her Marguerite 
of Austria, but this is hardly fair, for even 
if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor 
Maximilian she did not come into her own until 
she took up her residence in a beautiful castle in 
Malines and made that own the fortune and the 
destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people 
who had been given her. On both her father's 
side and her mother's she was English, if you go 
back far enough, her great, great, great-grand- 
father having been that "John of Gaunt (Ghent), 
time-honoured Lancaster" of whom we have heard 
before. Her mother, Mary of Burgundy, who 
died when she was a baby, traced her line back 
through Charles the Bold and Isabella of Bour- 
bon to John of Gaunt's daughter, Philippa, who 
married John I of Portugal; and it is through 
Philippa's son Eduard and his daughter Eleanor 
who married Maximilian's father, the Emperor 
Frederick III, that the strain comes on the father's 

191 



192 HEART OF EUROPE 

side. So "Margaret of Malines" let her be; and 
as well the well-beloved Regent of Flanders, for 
never, even in the great days of great kings and 
governors, was there ever a better sovereign or 
a more engaging lady. 

The Middle Ages are as full of lovable and ad- 
mirable women as the Renaissance is of sinister 
and regrettable representatives of the same sex. 
They had no votes and they claimed no rights; 
they were less welcome at birth than princes, and 
they were incontinently (and often prodigally) 
married off without a "by your leave" by their 
scheming fathers. Wholly subservient both in 
principle and in law, they were anything but this 
in fact, and a study of the Middle Ages reveals 
a certain feminine dominance that is startling to 
the male of to-day. It is well to remember that 
the clinging type, with the ringlets and facile emo- 
tions and tears, is a product of modern civilisa- 
tion; mediae valism knew nothing of it, and little 
of that even less attractive aspect that always 
becomes conspicuous when society is breaking 
down at the end of an era; a Catherine of Russia, 
while not without prototypes in the Middle Ages, 
would have been as anomalous then as a Blanche 
of Castile in the eighteenth century. Apparently, 



MARGARET OF MALINES 193 

the only conspicuous differences between the men 
and women of medievalism were that the men 
did the fighting and most of the active or violent 
work, while the women directed their courses, 
corrected their mistakes, and built up their char- 
acter and that of their children; and that the 
men confined themselves to the tactics while the 
women controlled the major strategy of the 
battle of life. 

The glitter and the show remained with the 
men, the substance of power remained with the 
women, and as their vision is apt to be wider 
and more penetrating it is fortunate that this 
was so. Of course it was all a part of the very 
real supremacy of Christianity over all domains 
of activity, all phases of life and thought. As 
soon as its power began to lapse and old pagan 
theories came in with the Renaissance, while 
Our Lady and the saints were dethroned by the 
Reformation, the wholesome balance was over- 
thrown and women slowly fell back to that 
earlier position where the only defence against 
male oppression was the power of sex, the result 
being those artificial barriers and differences, and 
the unwholesome bartering of bribes and promises 
and threats, that always have resulted, and al- 



194 HEART OF EUROPE 

ways will, in a complete downfall of personal and 
social righteousness. The problem to-day is not 
how women are to get the ballot but how they 
are to regain their old mediaeval equality (or 
supremacy if you like) without it. During me- 
dievalism men were more masculine and women 
more feminine than ever before or since, and in 
all probability a good part of the ethical, cultural, 
and social success of the time was due to this 
fact and to the absence of artificial barriers that 
denied to demonstrated character and to proved 
capacity the opportunity of effective service. 

Whenever you find a great man in mediaeval 
history (or any other for that matter) cherchez la 
femme ; ten to one you will find behind a St. Louis 
a mother like Blanche of Castile, or a guardian 
like Margaret of Austria behind a Charles V. 
Men try in vain to change the course of history 
by their own efforts; women always have the 
power to do this through the new generation they 
are nursing and educating, while the men are ex- 
hausting their energies in the fighting and the 
politics and the everlasting strenuousness that 
bring so many great things to pass that hardly 
last overnight. After all, so far anyway as the 
Middle Ages are concerned, it was the monks 



MARGARET OF MALINES 195 

and nuns at their endless prayers in chapel and 
cell and cloister, and the mothers in their tall 
towers and their walled gardens, with their chil- 
dren about them, that made the great and en- 
during things possible. 

Margaret of Malines was as perfect a type of 
this consecrated womanhood as one could find in 
a year's delving in ancient history; in addition 
she was a particularly charming lady and a very 
great statesman. Moreover her twenty-three years 
of rule in the Netherlands cover a particularly 
significant and interesting period in the history 
of this country and the end of mediaeval civilisa- 
tion here when it had outlasted its career else- 
where in Europe, so we may try in a chapter to 
give some idea of society in the Heart of Europe, 
at exactly the moment when it was about to sur- 
render to the anarchy that already was progres- 
sively dominant elsewhere. 

Margaret was born on January 10, 1480, in 
Brussels. Her father, the Archduke Maximilian 
of Hapsburg, was apparently a kind of imperial 
Admirable Crichton — handsome, fearless, a gal- 
lant knight, a poet, painter, scholar, patron of 
all arts and letters, and as serenely conscious of 
his personal merits as they deserved. Her mother 



196 HEART OF EUROPE 

was the beautiful Mary of Burgundy, daughter 
of the headlong and magnificent Charles the 
Bold and Isabel of Bourbon who, like Margaret's 
own mother, and her father's mother, Eleanor of 
Portugal, was one of those fine and beautiful 
characters with which mediaeval history is so 
full. When the little Margaret was only two 
years old her radiant mother, who was adored 
by every one, was killed while hunting and Maxi- 
milian, who was heartbroken and quite frantic with 
grief, found his two children, Margaret and her 
brother Philip, seized by the somewhat aggressive 
burghers of Ghent on the ground that it was for 
the state, and not the father, to determine their 
education and their future. Louis XI of France 
was undoubtedly behind them, for he believed he 
saw his chance to devour Burgundy, and in the 
end he cleverly engineered the treaty of Arras 
whereby the small Margaret was affianced to his 
son Charles and taken to the French court to be 
properly educated, while Philip remained in Flan- 
ders to be reared as the burghers saw fit. 

Fortunately, the old French spider, Louis XI, 
died almost as soon as Margaret reached Paris, 
and her education was undertaken by his daughter 
the Princess Anne, who became regent for the 



MARGARET OF MALINES 197 

Dauphin Charles and was another of those strong 
and righteous personalities of a time that already 
had almost exhausted itself by overproduction. 
Under her able direction the chateau of Amboise 
became a kind of "finishing school" for princesses, 
and here the small Margaret was subjected to a 
system of training that would stagger the present 
day. "On a foundation of strong religious prin- 
ciples hewn from the early fathers of the Church 
and the Enseignements de Saint Louis, she built 
up a moral and philosophic education with the 
help of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato 
as studied with the commentary of Boethius," 
maintaining a cloisteral simplicity of life and 
fighting affectation and pretence with an austere 
ardour that contrasts quaintly with the court life 
of the time. And all this just before the discovery 
of America and on the eve of the election of the 
Borgia, Alexander VI, to the Papacy ! 

In spite of her gorgeous betrothal to the poor 
little awkward and misshapen prince, the marriage 
was destined not to come off; political considera- 
tions intervened, and Charles married Anne, the 
heiress of Brittany, out of hand, and the Prin- 
cess Margaret was unceremoniously returned to 
Flanders where she was received with enthusiasm 



198 HEART OF EUROPE 

by her loyal if turbulent and irresponsible Flem- 
ings. 

The situation was characteristically fifteenth 
century, which is to say impetuous and fantastic. 
Maximilian had just been made King of the 
Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire; 
he had ventured into the nest of unruly Flemings, 
been captured, and imprisoned for eleven weeks, 
to the scandal of Europe and of the Pope who 
put both Bruges and Ghent under the interdict. 
Maximilian won in the end by promising much 
and performing little, and then backed Brittany 
against France, intending to marry the little 
Princess Anne, but he lost both the battle and 
his coveted bride with her desirable territories, 
both being won by his prospective son-in-law 
Charles who at one blow threw over Margaret, 
and won the very lady her father had been striving 
to attain. Maximilian's irritation was perhaps 
excusable under the circumstances, but when he 
found no one who really cared to help him in a 
war against France he turned to schemes of a 
new crusade for driving the Turks out of Eu- 
rope, consoled himself with a Sforza princess from 
Milan, and worked out a beautiful new scheme of 
a Spanish alliance by marrying his son Philip to 



MARGARET OF MALINES 199 

the Princess Juana and Margaret to the royal 
Infante, Don Juan. Margaret was now seven- 
teen, and after Dona Juana had made her way 
to Flanders by sea, always in imminent danger of 
shipwreck, and married Prince Philip, she took 
the poor storm-tossed ladies-in-waiting back with 
her by the same uncomfortable route, producing 
for their edification, in the midst of the worst of 
the incessant tempests, her proposed epitaph which 
ran: 

"Ci-gist Margot, la gentile demoiselle 
Qu'eut deux maris, et ci mourut pucelle." 

The epitaph was not needed, and Margaret 
reached Spain at last, where she was received 
with wild joy, at once becoming the idol of all 
who met her, from Queen Isabella down. The 
prince was of the same temper as herself, hand- 
some, noble in character, learned, proficient in 
all the arts, and they were married the moment 
Lent was over, in the midst of a kind of frenzy 
of general joy and magnificence. This was on 
Easter Sunday, April 10, 1497; on October 4 
the fairy prince was dead of the plague, dying 
as he had lived his brief life of nineteen years, 
a gentle and perfect knight, destroying the golden 
dreams of his people, breaking the heart of the 



200 HEART OF EUROPE 

Queen, and leaving Margaret, heartbroken also, 
to await the birth of her child, who was born only 
to die after a single breath. The life of the girl- 
widow was despaired of, but she finally recovered, 
and in spite of the prayers of the sorrowing Queen 
and court, who had acquired a passionate affec- 
tion for her, returned to Flanders, where her 
brother Philip, through a sequence of deaths in 
the royal family of Spain, had suddenly found his 
wife the heir to the vast and powerful kingdom. 
Margaret arrived in 1499 and two years later, 
again for political reasons (her spirited father now 
being interested in the conquest of Italy), was 
married to Duke Philibert of Savoy, Philibert 
le Beau, a figure of splendour, courage, learning, 
and beneficence; devoted to his people, to govern- 
mental and industrial reform, to the founding of 
schools, hospitals, monasteries. One looks aghast 
on the mortality of young and promising leaders 
at this particular time. They arise like splendid 
stars, they embody all the beneficent quality of 
the five centuries of medievalism that already 
had come to an end; they have no kinship with 
the new type of the Renaissance then first show- 
ing itself — with a Henry VIII, a Francis I, a 
Philip II, an Alexander VI — and one by one they 



MARGARET OF MALINES 201 

are blotted out of the darkening heavens. Born 
out of due time, after the ending of an epoch of 
righteousness and beauty, they seem to be taken 
away from a world they could not save and that 
could only have been for them a misery and a 
disappointment, as it was for Margaret's baby 
nephew, Charles, who was destined to inherit the 
world in its chaotic desolation only to surrender 
it at last and seek refuge in the cloister. 

So it was with this model of chivalry, Philibert 
the Beautiful; three years of ecstatic happiness 
were granted him and his duchess, Margaret, and 
then he also died, in the room in which he had 
been born, at Pont d'Ain, only twenty-four years 
before. Margaret withdrew at once from the 
world, cut off her great wealth of golden hair, and 
devoted herself to prayers and devotions, and to 
the building at Brou, in memory of the dead duke, 
of that matchless piece of architectural jewel work, 
the shrine that occupied the energies of the great- 
est artist-craftsmen in Europe for a period of 
twenty -five years. From every part of France, 
Flanders, Burgundy, Italy architects, painters, 
sculptors, glassmakers, wood-workers, craftsmen 
in metals were gathered together, and thus they 
laboured year after year, at first supervised by the 



202 HEART OF EUROPE 

Duchess Margaret from an oratory she had built 
where she might divide her time between inter- 
cessions for the repose of the soul of her knight 
and superintendence of the building that was to 
immortalise his memory and form the place of 
sepulture for him, and for her when God willed. 
In the money of our time the cost of this shrine, 
small as it is, was over $4,000,000, and it rep- 
resented the ending of art as it maiked the end- 
ing of a great epoch. 

The peace and the withdrawal from the world 
the poor princess desired above everything were 
denied her. Two years after the death of the 
Duke of Savoy, Philip, the only son of Maximil- 
ian, brother of Margaret, husband of poor Dona 
Juana, who was destined to a life of madness, 
Philip, Archduke of Austria, regent of the Nether- 
lands, King of Castile, another of the promising 
princes of Christendom, died at the age of twenty- 
eight, leaving five children, with another shortly to 
be born, and amongst them was the seven-year-old 
Charles, the heir of the world. At the solemn 
obsequies in the Cathedral of St. Rombaut in 
Malines (the same whose tower is now shattered 
by Prussian shells), at the end of the mass, the 
King-at-Arms of the Golden Fleece cast his baton 




THE TOWER OF ST. ROMBAUT, MALINES 



MARGARET OF MALINES 203 

along the pavement and cried three times in a 
loud voice: "Le Roi est mort !" Raising it again 
he cried again: "Vive don Charles, par la grace 
Dieu, Archiduc d'Autrice, Prince des Espagnes!" 
and without a pause a herald continued, raising 
his great banner from the ground, "de Bourbon, 
de Lostric, et de Brabant"; and a second, "Comte 
de Flandres, d'Arethorys, de Bourgone, Palatin 
d'Haynault, de Hollande, de Zelande, de Namur, 
et de Zutphen!" and a third continued the long 
list, and a fourth, the last ending: "Marquis du 
Sainct Empire, Seigneur de Frise, de Salins, et de 
Malines!" 

So the future Lord of the World entered into 
his inheritance at the age of seven, and as always, 
without a murmur or a protest, Margaret left her 
oratory, turned from her slowly rising shrine, and 
went into Flanders to be guardian for the future 
Emperor, to train him for his task, and meantime 
to administer for him one of the most turbulent, 
if rich and beautiful, dominions of his patrimony. 

Bruges and Ghent were too uncertain in their 
temper as the result of an uncontrolled guild 
system and its inevitable democracy, inorganic 
and chaotic. Moreover, Margaret herself had been 
educated in Malines by her grandmother, Mar- 



204 HEART OF EUROPE 

garet of York, widow of Charles the Bold, so to 
Malines she came with four of her little nephews 
and nieces, and was received with great rejoicing, 
taking up her residence in a very splendid palace, 
the Hotel de Savoy, portions of which still re- 
main and are used as a Palais de Justice. 

Malines in 1507 was a very different city from 
that of to-day; as we could have seen it a year 
ago with its narrow and winding streets, its frag- 
ments of old ruins, its little gabled houses, we 
loved it for its quaintness and its modest pictur- 
esqueness which formed a kind of foil to the vast 
tower of St. Rombaut, lifting like a truncated 
obelisk above a low plain. At the beginning of 
the sixteenth century it was, like the other great 
cities of Flanders and Brabant, a place of palaces 
and gardens, a courtly and splendid city, rich, 
busy, magnificent. In the night of the "Spanish 
Fury" in Antwerp it is of record that amongst 
other proud buildings, five hundred palaces of 
marble or chiselled stone were destroyed, and this 
gives some idea of the nature of the other cities 
that rivalled and exceeded Antwerp in magnifi- 
cence. Malines, when the Duchess Margaret took 
up her abode there, was no village of dark and 
dirty little streets, but a city of palaces, far finer 



MARGARET OF MALINES 205 

than London, or even Paris, and a fitting residence 
for a princely court and for the future Emperor. 

The new Regent made it more magnificent than 
ever; it was a time when five centuries of mediaeval 
culture were blooming in beauty and great learn- 
ing, and the beneficent qualities of the early, or 
Christian Renaissance, were uniting with all that 
had come from an epoch whose term had already 
arrived. In Italy the Renaissance had rotted into 
a poison, but the virus had penetrated only a little 
way into the veins of Europe. The Papacy was 
rotten to the core, the Medici were cloaking their 
pestilential tyranny and their glorification of 
material gain in the fine vesture of learning and 
aesthetics. Machiavelli was dethroning Christian 
ethics and substituting efficiency in its place, 
but the Christian Renaissance was still fighting 
its losing battle through Cardinal Cusa, Sir 
Thomas More, and Erasmus. Diirer, Holbein, 
Hans Sachs were giving a new glory to at least 
two of the arts in Germany, and as yet Luther 
was no more than a threat, Wolsey a rising star 
whose balefulness was not apparent, Calvin un- 
heard of, Henry VIII a splendid prince shortly 
to be proclaimed "Defender of the Faith" he was 
so soon to cast down into the mire. 



206 HEART OF EUROPE 

In the domains of Margaret of Malines the 
afterglow of Catholic culture was still golden and 
gracious, and while she defended the interests 
and the welfare of the principality she held in 
trust with a vigour and a persistency that threw 
into the shade the lesser abilities of her male 
predecessors, she made of her city a new centre 
of learning and righteousness. Here came Louis 
Vives and Adrian, Archbishop of Utrecht, later 
the Pope of a year who, had he lived, might have 
reformed the Church and made the Protestant 
Reformation innocuous; Erasmus of Rotterdam, 
that engaging character who could have matched 
and worsted Luther, and done his work better 
than he, had he possessed the sincerity and the 
consecration of a martyr; "Cornelius Agrippa," 
Masse, Everard, Molinet, Renacle de Florienne, 
and other lesser lights. Mabuse, Van Orley, 
Coxcie came as painters to produce the altar- 
pieces and portraits desired by the Regent and 
her court; composers and musicians sought her 
patronage, for she had a passionate love for music 
of all sorts and wrote many poems and songs which 
they set after the fashion of the time. Her in- 
terest in architecture was intense, and she made 
Rombaut Keldermans her court architect, charg- 



MARGARET OF MALINES 207 

ing him amongst other things with the comple- 
tion of the vast tower of the church of his name- 
saint, begun by his direct ancestor Jan in 1452. 
This was a famous family of master masons, Jan, 
with his brother Andre, Mathieu, Antoine, and 
later Antoine II, Rombaut, and Laurent. The 
designs for the completion of St. Rombaut's tower 
and also for a great Hotel de Ville are still pre- 
served, and in vision one can see them carried 
out by and by in a new and regenerated Malines 
under a new and regenerated civilisation. As a 
matter of fact, the stone for St. Rombaut's spire 
was already cut and on the ground when the for- 
tunes of Flanders changed, and in 1582 it was all 
seized by the Prince of Orange, and carried away 
to build a new town at Willemstadt. During 
Margaret's regency, the great Cathedral of Ste. 
Gudule at Brussels was built, the good part of 
the Ghent Hotel de Ville, the belfry of Bruges, 
the spire of Antwerp, as well as innumerable 
other great works that perished at the hands of 
the Spaniards, the Calvinists, and the French 
devils of the Revolution. 

As a collector of books, pictures, works of art 
of all kinds she was indefatigable. In her own 
house, which was a true palace of art, were Van 



208 HEART OF EUROPE 

Eycks, Mendings, Van der Weydens, Dierick 
Bouts, most of which succumbed long ago to 
ignorance and vandalism. There were priceless 
tapestries without end, sequences of six or more: 
The Life of Queen Esther, the Story of the Three 
Kings, of the Earthly Paradise, of Arcadia; La Cite 
des Dames, the History of the Cid, of Alexander, 
of St. Helena. An inventory of the palace art 
still exists and reads like a story out of the Arabian 
Nights; we here find catalogued wonderful car- 
pets and rugs; armour inlaid with gold and silver; 
caskets, clocks, vases of precious metals, carved 
and engraved gems, precious marbles, jasper, 
ivory, alabaster, chalcedony; gold-and-silver plate 
set with precious stones. As for her private 
library it was a treasure-house and a student's 
sanctuary. There were one hundred and fifty 
vellum volumes illumined with colours and gold 
and bound in velvet, gilded leather, metal studded 
with gems; there were three editions of Aristotle, 
four of Livy, with the works of Ovid, Seneca, 
Caesar. There was a large collection of theological 
and moral works, decretals and digests in Latin 
and French, the works of St. Augustine, Lives of 
Saints, Bibles, missals, breviaries, books of hours, 
Gospels, Testaments. Froissart was there, with 



MARGARET OF MALINES 209 

all the old Arthurian romances, as well as the 
"Golden Legend/' "Le Livre de Tresor," "le Mir- 
roir du Monde," "le Mirroir des Dames"; books 
on hunting, falconry, chess, fashions. All these 
were illumined manuscripts, but printing was al- 
ready an industry, and what Margaret had in this 
line we can only guess, as this particular cata- 
logue is gone. 

It was in this wonderful palace, set in the 
midst of many other palaces in a rich and courtly 
city, where the streets were always full of the 
pageantry of the iridescent mingling of an end- 
ing medievalism and an unfolding Renaissance, 
that Margaret lived for a quarter of a century, 
training the little princes and princesses, admin- 
istering the very complicated affairs of her state, 
defending it against aggression, composing its 
internal differences, giving aid to the sick, the 
suffering, and the disquieted in mind and soul, 
conversing with the philosophers, poets, and 
theologians she had drawn from many sources, 
and all the time keeping architects, painters, 
sculptors, craftsmen busy in adding to the wealth 
of beauty already superabundant in the Nether- 
lands. 

Flanders and Brabant have always been for- 



210 HEART OF EUROPE 

tunate when women ruled in the place of men 
and never more so than under Margaret of Ma- 
lines. She guarded with the most jealous care 
every just interest of her people, beating at the 
outset Henry VII of England in a diplomatic 
contest, but later refusing to marry the thrifty 
monarch ("They have tried to marry me three 
times, but my luck is bad."), bringing Charles of 
Guelders to rights, aiding in the defeat of France 
by her father and young Prince Henry of Eng- 
land at the Battle of the Spurs, but on the whole 
maintaining an unwonted peace. 

Not for a thousand years had there been a 
time more momentous than the years of Mar- 
garet's regency; more complicated in its conflict- 
ing currents, more amazing in its possibilities 
and in the ideas that were brought forth. The 
Renaissance was in the saddle in Italy, riding the 
Church and society to their fall; in Germany 
Protestantism was claiming and fighting for the 
succession, while France was following Italy in 
its progressive corruption, England still standing 
firm behind her Channel cliffs that seemed so well 
to defend her against spiritual as well as physical 
invasion. All things were changing, a new era 
was establishing itself, but Maximilian was not 



MARGARET OF M ALINES 211 

content to see the old depart without a struggle, 
nor was his son Charles when he succeeded him. 
In the voluminous correspondence that has been 
preserved between the Emperor and his Regent 
of the Netherlands there is an astounding letter 
which reveals the almost insane lengths to which 
the imagination could go in these overstimulated 
times; in it Maximilian confesses that he has a 
great scheme for the redemption of Europe and it 
is this: he, himself, is to be made a kind of coad- 
jutor to the Pope (Julius II, then ill), whereupon 
he will surrender the Empire to his son Charles, 
and then when Julius shall die, be made Pope in 
his place, thus uniting all spiritual and temporal 
power in the persons of the Hapsburg father and 
son ! 

He wouldn't have made a bad Pope, this shrewd, 
crusading, idealistic Maximilian, certainly he 
would have been a better than the Alexander VI, 
Julius II, Leo X type then in vogue, and the 
vision of Maximilian in the chair of Peter, with 
Charles V the temporal lord of the world, is 
stimulating and provocative of speculation as to 
what might have happened. However, it all came 
to nothing; Julius recovered, and was succeeded 
in 1513 by Leo X, who reigned furiously for eight 



212 HEART OF EUROPE 

years and then died, to be succeeded, not by 
Wolsey, who was exerting every diplomatic and 
pecuniary agency to gain the prize, not by a Car- 
dinal of the Medici or the Colonna, but by an 
obscure recluse, Adrian, sometime Archbishop of 
Utrecht, a gentle professor at Louvain whom 
Maximilian had discovered and sent to Malines 
to help educate the future Charles V, and who 
had since been immured in Spain as Cardinal of 
Tortosa. 

It was one of those kaleidoscopic phenomena 
that gave an exceeding vivacity to the age. Into 
the midst of a line of Popes distinguished for their 
highly developed and quite artificial taste, their 
rapacity and simony, their persistent nepotism 
and their serene profligacy, came suddenly a shy, 
ascetic student, pious, austere, and simple. Into 
the Vatican of an Alexander VI and Leo X he 
came with his old Flemish housekeeper, to the 
horror of the curia, and, we may believe, the 
sympathetic amusement of the angels. For a 
moment it seemed as though the ideal of Maximil- 
ian was to be attained by more orthodox methods. 
Adrian VI set himself to the task of reforming 
not alone the curia but the whole Church; to 
regenerate Catholicism on Catholic lines, defeat 



MARGARET OF MALINES 213 

Protestantism in its own field, restore peace to the 
world. Destiny, however, is not to be escaped; 
the world had busily made its bed and in it it was 
destined to lie. One by one each young and 
righteous prince had been taken away by death 
before he could set his lance in rest against the 
common enemy, and now the anomalous Pope 
was denied his self-appointed task. In less than 
two years he was dead, Clement VII reigned in 
his stead, and the world, having taken a long 
breath of relief, went on very much as before, to 
its inescapable destiny. 

When he was fifteen years old Charles formally 
took over the government of the Netherlands and 
four years later he was elected to the Empire, 
becoming Charles V, but Margaret still remained 
at the head of the Council of Regency of the Neth- 
erlands. In the wars between the Emperor and 
Francis I, the Netherlands escaped as the fight- 
ing was elsewhere, and their peace and prosperity 
remained practically unbroken. In the end Mar- 
garet crowned her career by initiating and com- 
pleting the "Ladies' Peace," which resulted in 
the treaty of Cambrai. Francis I had already 
been completely beaten by the Emperor, renounc- 
ing his claims over Flanders and Artois and 



214 HEART OF EUROPE 

promising to keep the peace, but he promptly 
broke all his engagements and had to be beaten 
again, very thoroughly this time, with further 
disastrous results to the remains of Christian 
culture, for Clement VII had joined with Francis 
against the Empire, and Rome was stormed and 
sacked by the lawless troops of the Constable of 
Bourbon, unfortunately killed in the assault, 
amidst appalling scenes of murder, arson, and 
pillage, when untold wealth of ancient art was 
utterly destroyed. The whole war was a scandal 
on the name of decency and more than Margaret 
and the other decent women could bear, so she 
proposed to the Emperor that she should under- 
take to make peace, and actually succeeded in 
doing so, with the aid of Louise of Savoy, mother 
of King Francis, Marguerite of France, Queen 
of Navarre, and Marie of Luxembourg, Countess 
of Vendome. 

Margaret's work was apparently finished. All 
her brother's children had been guarded, educated, 
and married, Eleanore to the King of Portugal, 
Isabelle to the King of Denmark, Marie to the 
King of Hungary, while Ferdinand who had been 
educated in Spain had married Anne of Hungary 
and received from his brother, the Emperor, the 



MARGARET OF MALINES 215 

throne of Austria, to which were added Bohemia 
and Hungary after the great beating back of the 
Turks from Vienna in 1529, since King Louis, 
husband of Marie, had lost his life in the terrible 
disaster of the battle of Mohacs in 1526, when for 
the moment the Moslems had been victorious 
and had threatened all Europe from the field 
where 20,000 had laid down their lives in a vain 
attempt to stem the heathen tide. 

As for her imperial nephew Charles, he was now 
the unquestioned head of the Holy Roman Em- 
pire and leader of Christendom; on February 24, 
1530, he was solemnly crowned by the Pope, 
in Bologna, with the Iron Crown of Lombardy 
and the crown of Charlemagne. Peace of sorts, 
had settled on Europe, and it was a peace of 
Margaret's own making. The Lutheran heresy 
was sullen and threatening, but thus far there 
was no actual violence. There was a pause in the 
ominous progress of events, and tired, apprehen- 
sive Margaret determined to resign her charge 
to the Emperor, who was coming from his crown- 
ing to visit her in Malines, and retire to one of 
the convents she herself had founded. She had 
earned the peace she desired, and a greater peace, 
which was accorded her by the grace of God, 



216 HEART OF EUROPE 

for on November 30, 1530, she died from an 
overdose of opium given her by her physicians 
in preparation for an operation that had become 
necessary, owing to an injury to a foot which 
had not been properly treated. 

She died as she had lived, thoughtful for others, 
generous, meek in spirit, sincerely and devotedly 
a Catholic. All the Netherlands mourned for her 
as a righteous and able governor and, after the 
imposing funeral services in Bruges, she was 
carried through the snow, along the road she had 
followed on her wedding journey, thirty years be- 
fore, to the church at Brou, where she was placed 
by the side of the husband, who had been hers 
for so few years, and for love of whom she had 
built the most beautiful shrine in Europe. 

The church at Brou is the last of Gothic art, 
and Margaret of Austria, by the love of her 
people, Margaret of Malines, was the last of the 
great and righteous and pious women of the age 
that had made this art its own. 

With the passing of Margaret, Malines ceased 
to be the capital of the Netherlands, but for 
compensation in some sort it was made an arch- 
bishopric; and though its great palaces have 
passed with its glory, the hoarded art and the 




A DETAIL FROM THE CHURCH AT BROU 



MARGARET OF MALINES 217 

marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the 
fires of sacrilege or enrich the galleries of the utter- 
most parts of the earth, though its wealth is no 
more and throngs of finely clad burghers and 
merchants no longer enrich its winding streets 
with the pageant of a wedded Medievalism and 
Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandise- 
ment has come in these later days a new honour 
to Malines; for when war and pillage again swept 
it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of 
Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand 
forth and defy the spoiler, while shaming his too- 
cautious ecclesiastical superior, weighing, vacil- 
lating, counting costs and profits in the midst of 
his buzzing curia. 

The Heart of Europe, pierced by the sword 
and shedding the life-blood that had coursed for 
a thousand years through the arteries of the 
world, knew that the hour of the eternal question 
had come, that the clean division between right 
and wrong had been cut by the sword, that once 
more the Voice had gone forth: "He that is not 
with Me is against Me," and that there was no 
longer place on earth for the emasculate, the 
neuter, in the catchword parlance of the time, 
the neutral. Peter shuddered and hesitated on 



218 HEART OF EUROPE 

the throne of the Fisherman; great nations out- 
side the widening ring of fire counted the cost and 
dreamed day-dreams of arbitration and pacifica- 
tion, but once again Malines spoke, as in the past, 
with the tongue of the past — and of the future. 
Mercier of Malines spoke for God and his own 
people, and for the righteousness that is eternal, 
as four centuries ago spoke Margaret of Malines. 



XI 

THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 

THE history, the principles, the motives, the 
methods of that mode of art which expresses 
itself in pictorial form are involved in more error 
and misrepresentation than happens in the case 
of any of its allies. For this the nineteenth 
century, and particularly the Teutonic nine- 
teenth century, with its inability to understand 
art in any form save that of music, is chiefly 
responsible. Every effort has been made to iso- 
late it as an independent form of art, to confine 
it to "easel painting" on panel or canvas, or to 
wall decorations conceived after the same fashion 
and on the same lines, to reduce it to certain 
schools and individuals and localities; in a word, 
to make it a highly specialised form of personal 
expression, like lyric poetry or theological heresy. 
This is to miss its essential character and deny 
its primary function. 

Painting is the use of colour and the com- 
position of lines and forms for sheer joy in this 

219 



220 HEART OF EUROPE 

particular kind of beauty; for the honouring of 
the most honourable things ; for the stimulating of 
high and fine human emotion; for the symbolical 
(and therefore sacramental) expression of spiritual 
adventures and experiences that so far transcend 
the limitations of the material that they are not 
susceptible of intellectual manifestation. Paint- 
ing is primarily and in its highest estate an ally 
and an aid of architecture, as are also sculpture 
and (in a less intimate degree) music, poetry, and 
the drama, all working together for the building 
up, under the inspiration of religion, of a great 
stimulus and a great expression. As a thing by 
itself it fails of half its power, but, like all the arts, 
it can be used in this way, though indifferently 
and only within certain limitations. To say, 
therefore, that painting as an art began with 
Giotto or Cimabue or Duccio, is absurd; there 
was great painting long before them, and some of 
it reached heights even they could not attain. 
Of course most of it is gone, vanishing with the 
destroyed or remodelled buildings, where it worked 
intimately with architecture, scraped off by "re- 
storers," whitewashed by iconoclasts, done over 
by easel painters, so it is hard to judge it justly, 
but a few fragments remain in France and Italy 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 221 

that give some idea of its original power and 
beauty. 

Similarly, illumination is not a handicraft or an 
industrial art; it was frequently great art of a 
very distinguished quality, and so was the paint- 
ing of carving and sculpture, an art not disdained 
by the Van Eycks themselves. From the earliest 
beginnings of the Middle Ages there was great 
painting, and the Duccios and Massaccios and 
Memlings only added to it certain different, and 
not always admirable, qualities, while devising 
novel methods that made possible novel modes 
of expression. 

And here enters another misconception that 
has done much harm: the Van Eycks did not 
invent oil painting, if by the phrase is meant the 
oil painting of the nineteenth century. This, the 
use of mechanically ground pigments already 
mixed with an oil medium, is a trick hardly more 
than a century old, and is a time-saving device for 
the obtaining (which it does not succeed in doing), 
at the least expenditure of time and thought, of 
the effects originally produced by the old method 
that held from the time of Hubert Van Eyck down 
to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds. This old method 
consisted in dividing the work of a painter into 



222 HEART OF EUROPE 

three stages — drawing, modelling, colouring — each 
of which had to be done laboriously and to perfec- 
tion. After the picture had been drawn completely 
and in every detail it was modelled in a thick un- 
derpainting of impasto with its varied reliefs and 
textures, and then the colour was applied; succes- 
sive coats of transparent pigment, one imposed 
on the other, each being allowed to dry before 
the next was put on. The result was, amongst 
other things, that depth, resonance, and transpar- 
ency of colour that mark the great painting of the 
past and are absolutely unobtainable by the use of 
the opaque and muddy pigments squeezed out of 
collapsible tubes. In this earlier method there was 
no short road to success ; a painter could not sweep 
in his broad masses of paint with a few masterly 
strokes, masking his lack of proficiency in drawing 
by daring and theatrical brush work, and making 
amends for his opaque and unbeautiful colour 
by a stunning exhibition of a delusive chiaro- 
oscuro. Everything was built up laboriously and 
conscientiously; it was consummate craftsmanship, 
with much in common with stained glass, orfeverie, 
and even with architecture. No wonder a painter's 
training frequently began with a goldsmith ; it de- 
manded the most exquisite and conscientious craft 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 223 

and there was no substitute that a public trained 
in eye and quick in appreciation could be induced 
to accept. Temperament was no excuse for in- 
capacity; daring brush work made no amends for 
lack of competence; for once painting was on a 
par with the other arts, and a painter was as much 
a master of craft, and as rigidly held to its high- 
est standards, as a musician or a master builder. 

Of course there always had been fresco-paint- 
ing, and here the method was quite different, for 
the colour had to be applied swiftly and once for 
all to the wet plaster. Here the technique was 
direct and instantaneous, quite unlike that of 
panel painting, and though it was no more adapt- 
able to the vagaries of temperamental expression, 
it opened up new possibilities of which painters 
were always trying to take advantage. Giotto 
himself, being the greatest master of this partic- 
ular mode, was always working along these lines, 
and later Velasquez combined them with the 
possibilities inherent in the development of under- 
painting as a thing final in itself, without the 
laborious and studied glazing of successive coats 
of pure colour. 

The art of painting was never a rigid and im- 
mobile system; every painter was striving for 



224 HEART OF EUROPE 

new methods and new developments, and fre- 
quently finding them; in the end, as the old 
artistic sense died away, virtuosity took its place, 
and this found its opportunity through the elim- 
ination of all the old elements of craftsmanship 
and a development of the qualities of breadth 
and swiftness inherent in fresco-painting, to- 
gether with the dash and bravura that offered 
themselves through the clever manipulation of 
the thick and solid and suave material of the old 
underpainting. In a word, the tendency was 
toward combining drawing, modelling, and colour 
in one process, obtaining final effects in one 
operation; and while this meant a possible slouch- 
ing of drawing, a substitution of surprise and 
bravado for consistent modelling, a loss of all 
depth and resonance of colour, and the putting of 
a premium on such quite unimportant (and some- 
times vicious) matters as dashing brush work, it 
must be admitted it did permit "temperament" 
to express itself with a swiftness and mobility 
impossible before, granting always that this is 
desirable. 

Now in the working of this revolution the Van 
Eycks had no part whatever. They did not in- 
vent "oil painting" or anything like it. They 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 225 

were the greatest painter-craftsmen ever known, 
and they and the generations that followed them 
in Flanders and Italy held faithfully to the old 
threefold mode of operation until Tintoretto, 
Velasquez, and Rubens began to merge the three 
in one and to lay the foundations for the present 
lamentable subterfuges of the Salon and the 
Royal Academy. What they did do was this: 
until Hubert's time every painter had been 
searching for some medium which would not 
mitigate the perfect transparency of their hand- 
ground colours and would dry quickly. All kinds 
of viscous things had been employed — white of 
egg, fig juice, and other less seemly media — but 
none was wholly satisfactory. Oil was the natural 
thing, but oil was an unconscionable time in dry- 
ing. Hubert Van Eyck found some oil medium 
(or varnish) that dried quickly and this at once 
became the universal medium. It was a great 
discovery and a great boon, but it had nothing 
whatever to do with "oil painting," which did 
not actually come into existence until the dark 
days of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth 
century, therefore the skirts of the Van Eycks 
are clear and we can absolve them of all respon- 
sibility. 



226 HEART OF EUROPE 

There never was a school of such consummate 
craftsmanship as this of Flanders. The Van 
Eycks, Memling, Van der Weyden were the most 
perfectly trained, the most comprehensively com- 
petent, and the most conscientiously laborious 
artists ever known; also they understood drawing, 
composition, and lighting as no others ever did, 
while their sense of beauty of colour, either in it- 
self or in subtle and splendid combinations, was 
unique. They were not portents, sudden meteors 
shooting across a dark sky, they simply continued 
and developed a long and glorious tradition. 
Long before them the monasteries had been pro- 
ducing great art of every kind — frescos, illumina- 
tions, stained glass, embroidery, painted sculpture 
— and it was all art of the greatest. When Hubert 
painted the "Adoration of the Lamb," he merely 
gathered together all these arts and manifested 
his enormous and astounding synthesis in con- 
centrated form, and better than any one had ever 
done before. All the intricate delicacy of jewel 
work, all the vivacity of clean-cut sculpture, all 
the suavity of silken needlework, all the flaming 
splendour of stained glass are brought together 
here in one astonishing combination, and to this 
era-making synthesis is added the living light 




OUR LADY, FROM THE TRYPTICH AT GHENT 
HUBERT VAN EYCK 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 227 

and the human appeal of the poignant beauty of 
the world, and the transcendent magic of the super- 
natural, sacramentally and visibly set forth. 

This, which very well may be the greatest pic- 
ture in the world (it does not matter) , was ordered 
from Hubert Van Eyck when he was nearly fifty 
years old, he having been born about 1366 in the 
province of Limbourg and coming of a long line 
of painters. It was ordered by Jodocus Vydts, 
a worthy burgher of Ghent, as an altar-piece for 
a chapel he had built and endowed (according 
to the pious and admirable practice of those good 
Catholic times) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. 
For ten years he worked at his masterpiece, and 
then death overtook him in the year 1426, when 
his work was only partly finished, when his 
brother, Jan, took it up and brought it to a 
triumphant conclusion in 1432. It is a great trip- 
tych of twenty-two painted panels and its pres- 
ervation has been nothing short of miraculous. 
Philip II tried to carry it off in 1558, the Protes- 
tants to destroy it in 1566, and the Calvinists to 
give it away to Queen Elizabeth in 1578. It was 
nearly destroyed by fire in 1641, dismembered 
and packed away in 1781, carried off (parts of it) 
to Paris in 1794. In 1816 most of the wings were 



228 HEART OF EUROPE 

sold to a shrewd dealer for $20,000 and by him to 
the Berlin Museum for $80,000; finally the Adam 
and Eve panels were taken to the Brussels Mu- 
seum, and a set of copies attached to the mutilated 
remainder in the Cathedral of St. Bavon. 

The work is one vast, comprehensive, and sacra- 
mental manifestation of the central Catholic 
sacrament of the mass, searching and final in its 
symbolism, consummate in its mastery of all the 
elements that enter into the make-up of a great 
work of pictorial and decorative art, unapproached 
and unapproachable in its splendour of living 
and radiant colour. In its philosophical grasp, 
its technical perfection, its unearthly beauty, its 
communication of the very essence of a funda- 
mental mystery, and in its evocative power 
it staggers the imagination and takes its place 
amongst the few great works of man, in any cate- 
gory, which are so far beyond what seems possible 
of achievement that they rank as definitely super- 
human. So far as its spiritual content is con- 
cerned, it can no more be estimated than can the 
mass itself, or paraphrased in words than Chartres 
Cathedral or a Brahms symphony or the Venus 
of Melos. If the Van Eycks are responsible for 
this, they rank with St. Thomas Aquinas and 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 229 

Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci as the great- 
est creative forces amongst men. Of course they 
were not, nor the others, named. Somehow each 
was used by something greater than he: the con- 
centrated consciousness of his fellows, the under- 
lying and informing time-spirit of an era — or why 
not God Himself? — as a channel through which 
and by which absolute truth was communicated 
to man who, of his own motion, can do much, but 
not so much as this. 

For the consummate artistry, for the perfect 
sense of decoration and composition, the keen 
and exquisite line, the perception and recording 
of diversified character, the poignant love of all 
natural beauty and corresponding rejection of 
all ugliness, for the technique which is that of a 
master in the fashioning of precious metals and 
the cutting of priceless gems, for the colour that is 
now resonant with all the deep splendour of great 
music, now thin and aerial with all the delicacy 
of far horizons and misty forests at some pale 
dawn in a land of dreams — for all these things we 
may remember Hubert Van Eyck and his brother 
Jan, for this is their work, but beyond this we go 
elsewhere, at least as far as the mass itself, for the 
inspiration that has made this Flemish triptych 



230 HEART OF EUROPE 

one of the great, revealing creations of the world. 
The infinite variety of conception and rendition 
simply transcend experience. The three great, 
dominating figures — God the Father, Our Lady, 
and St. John Baptist — are of a Byzantine maj- 
esty transfused by a passionate humanism that is 
almost unique in any form. From them you pass 
to the central panel of the "Worship of the Lamb 
That Was Slain," which is as tender and personal 
and human as the best of Fra Angelico, and, like 
his clear visions, irradiated by a kind of paradisal 
glory that sets it in a heaven of its own; from this 
you go to the panels of singing angels and splen- 
did attendant knights and marching pilgrims that 
are pages out of the daily record of life in proud 
and beautiful Bruges, and finally you come to 
the Adam and Eve who are sheer, unadulterated 
realism unapproachable in its minute veracity. 
Surely, these two men were a type of the universal 
genius. They balked at nothing and found 
nothing too difficult of accomplishment, simply 
because they were perfectly trained and broadly 
accomplished craftsmen who knew that theirs 
was an exacting and a jealous craft for which 
" temperament" — artistic or otherwise — was not, 
and could not be made, a substitute. 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 231 

It is with a feeling almost of relief that we 
come down nearer the earth and confront the 
masterpieces of Jan Van Eyck. With Hubert 
we are taken into a kind of seventh heaven of 
mystical revelation; with his brother and those 
that follow we come back to what is more human, 
more in scale with experience. Great art still, 
as great as one can find elsewhere, and with all 
the mastery of methods, all the confident cer- 
tainty, all the triumphant colour and the ex- 
quisite design and the faultless craftsmanship of 
the painted "Beatific Vision" itself. There once 
were many other pictures by Hubert Van Eyck, 
but all now are gone, destroyed by the savage 
hands of Calvinists and Revolutionaries, and the 
"Adoration of the Lamb" remains alone as an 
isolated miracle. 

Jan was of another sort; equally great as a 
craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, 
the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those 
barbarous days before the culmination of the era 
of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated 
from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, 
made so by the possession of a then undiscovered 
and quite pathological affliction called the "artistic 
temperament." They were good citizens and an 



232 HEART OF EUROPE 

integral part of a like-minded community, serving 
their kind after many fashions, amongst them 
being the honourable and admirable craft of art. 
Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted 
statues and illuminated missals and fashioned 
stained glass; he created great altar-pieces and 
produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics and 
worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know 
he was an architect as well — at all events he might 
have been, as is proved by the wonderful drawing 
of St. Barbara with its background of a great 
Gothic tower under construction. A thoroughly 
typical example of his painting is the St. Donatian 
altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the ex- 
cellent old Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in 
adoration before Our Lady and the Holy Child 
and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. 
George. Mr. Berenson could find no finer ex- 
ample than this of that "space composition" on 
which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could 
paint no more exact and characteristic portraits; 
all the goldsmiths of Byzantium could not rival 
the jewel work of armour and orphreys, brocades 
and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while 
the colour, both in its individual parts and ^its 
composition, comes nearer the living light of the 




A DRAWING OF ST. BARBARA, JAN VAN EYCK 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 233 

windows of Chartres than any other painted colour 
in the world. One would like to hang this partic- 
ular picture (for a time only, then replacing it 
over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst 
of a "Rubens Gallery," or a room in the Luxem- 
bourg or the Royal Academy, and call all the 
world to see. 

There is little enough left of Jan's work, and 
for the same humiliating reason that holds in 
the case of his brother. Of Hans Memling, an- 
other wonder child, there is fortunately much. 
When one catalogues the list of this earliest and 
greatest work in Flanders and recalls the wrecking 
with axe and torch of cathedrals, abbeys, con- 
vents, hospitals, chateaux by Calvinists and sans- 
culottes ; the pyres of smouldering pictures, the 
ditches filled up with pulverised glass, shattered 
statues, illuminated missals and graduates and 
books of hours; the sacred vessels and gorgeous 
vestments, such as Hubert and Jan, Hans and 
Gerard showed in their pictures, despoiled of 
their splendid jewels (transferred for a considera- 
tion to Hebrew brokers) and melted down or 
used for chair covers, as the case may be; and 
when in this lurid light one weighs the thick hides 
and the muddled brains and the shrivelled souls 



234 HEART OF EUROPE 

of the wreckers against even the mere artistic value 
of their spoils, one marvels still more at the won- 
ders of scientific evolution and the promises of 
evolutionary philosophy. 

Memling is the third of the great trio of Flem- 
ings, and though there were innumerable others 
whose art was near perfection, these three stand 
for ever by themselves apart. There is more of 
human tenderness in his work and a certain 
spiritualisation informing everything that gives 
a different quality; the portraiture and differ- 
entiation of character are possibly beyond what 
any other ever attained, but his composition as 
it gains in complexity and facile ease loses some- 
thing of that broad and powerful directness, that 
supreme quality of rhythm and serenity that 
marked the Van Eycks. The colour also is less 
invariably sonorous, less pure and splendid and 
luminous both in its single tones and its har- 
monies, while now and then the universal Flemish 
passion for sumptuous stuffs and gorgeous pat- 
terns and glittering accessories betrays him into 
a loss of unity and balance. Still, any criticism 
is impudent; his St. Ursula series, his St. John 
Baptist, his St. Bertin and Floreins and Moreel 
altar-pieces are amongst the greatest pictures th^t 




From a photograph by Uanfstaengl 



A MEMLING ALTAR-PIECE 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 235 

have been painted, while his portraits are pure 
life expressed through the terms of pure beauty. 

It would be impossible to review all the work 
of all the great Flemings. Driven by the same 
impulse, each gave his own personality to all he 
did, and the sequence is as astonishing as it is 
priceless. Gerard, David, Roger Van der Weyden, 
Quentin Metsys, Dierick Bouts, Lucas Cranach, 
as well as numberless unknown whose work sur- 
vives their contemporary fame, all reached their 
several heights of attainment on their own in- 
dividual lines, and their pictures still remain 
in Bruges and Ghent, in Brussels and Antwerp 
(or remain to-day, in August, 1915) to bear wit- 
ness to the full and vigorous life, the wholesome 
and happy religious devotion, the astonishing 
physical beauty of Flemish environment of those 
last years of the fifteenth century in Europe when 
the fair day of medievalism came to its golden 
close. \ 

Between this whole-souled art of the Middle 
Ages and that of the Renaissance came an in- 
tervening group that served to effect the neces- 
sary modulation from one key to quite another. 
Mabeuse, Van Orley, the younger Porbus, and the 
Breughels are the chief representatives and through 



236 HEART OF EUROPE 

them one sees the old and masculine qualities 
dying away, the new and alien elements from the 
south entering in to take possession. When this 
transition was effected it was in Holland that it 
found its opportunity, and as the Dutch provinces 
are outside our consideration we need not con- 
sider here the products of a school that ranged 
in quality from Rubens to Rembrandt, from 
Frans Hals to Vermeer of Delft. The succession 
was broken, the torch (with whatever flame that 
remained) was passed from the Flemings to the 
Dutch, and only Vandyck appeared in the line 
of true Flemish descent to demonstrate the pos- 
sibilities that still remained in spite of Rubens 
(and at the hands of his own pupil) for the develop- 
ment of a restrained and self-respecting and beauti- 
ful art, even though the moving spirit had been 
dissolved and the great tradition become no more 
than a memory. The great period of mediaeval 
painting (for it was this in spirit and in truth) 
had begun and ended in this Cor Cordium, this 
Flemish concentration of the Heart of Europe. 
It had begun with the monkish illuminations of 
the fourteenth century, culminated in the great 
century from 1395, when Hubert Van Eyck be- 
gan to paint, to 1494, when Memling died, and 




From a -photograph by Hanfstaengl 

MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ST. LUKE, VAN DER WEYDEN 



THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS 237 

slowly disappeared under the influence of the 
Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Spanish 
oppression; by the year 1600 it had ceased to 
exist, and the Renaissance, which had established 
itself in all secular and ecclesiastical matters, now 
took over art also for the purpose of developing 
its own exact expression. The five centuries of 
Catholic civilisation had come to an end. 



XII 

GOTHIC SCULPTURE 

IONG before the days of the Pisani in Italy, who 
J were erroneously held to have been the re- 
storers of the lost art of sculpture, France had 
initiated and developed three great schools, one 
of which at least reached greater heights even 
than the later schools of Italy, even than Dona- 
tello and Michael Angelo if you test this art by 
the established principles of the greatest sculpture 
the world has ever known — that of Greece. These 
three were : The school of the south with Toulouse 
as a centre, the school of Burgundy, or Vezelay, 
and the school of the lie de France. The first is 
of the late eleventh century, the second of the 
twelfth, the third of the latter part of this cen- 
tury and the first half of the thirteenth. The 
earlier work south of the Loire is part Roman, 
part Byzantine, and it occasionally reaches, as 
at Moissac, a level of extraordinary decorative 
value, with, in its bas reliefs, a feeling for rhyth- 
mical line and space composition that are quite 

238 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 239 

astounding. In Burgundy, combined with great 
rudeness and an almost savage directness, there 
is far greater humanism, with much action and 
an unusual amount of character differentiation; 
much of the best work of this school is to be 
found at Autun and Vezelay. With the middle 
years of the twelfth century the sculpture of the 
lie de France seems suddenly to burst forth at 
St. Denis and Chartres like some miraculous hap- 
pening. It was not this, but the result of many 
years of cumulative and progressive effort; but 
all that went before has perished, while fortu- 
nately some examples at St. Denis and a supreme 
collection at Chartres remain to give the impres- 
sion of an unwonted and unheralded event. This 
sculpture of Chartres is more superbly architec- 
tural, more intimately a part of the whole artistic 
scheme than any other on record; all is formal, 
conventionalised; the figures are erect, rigid, 
immensely elongated; the multiplied fine lines 
and delicate zigzags of the drapery, the simple 
figure-modelling, the immobile, dispassionate faces, 
all show a most curious self-abnegation on the 
part of the sculptor and a profound conviction 
that both he and his art are only part of a greater 
whole, for they are purely architectural and in- 



240 HEART OF EUROPE 

deed nothing but the architectural spirit expressing 
itself through an allied artistic mode. They are 
startlingly akin to archaic Greek work and, as 
Professor Moore has said of the sculpture from 
Delos: "One of these ancient Greek statues might, 
if wrought in French limestone and slightly modi- 
fied in outline, stand in the west portal of Chartres 
without apparent lack of keeping." Yet there is 
manifestly no possible point of historical contact 
between the Hellenic and the French work, and 
the kinship simply shows the persistence of cer- 
tain ways of looking at and feeling about things, 
and the inevitable if unconscious return of one 
generation to the ways of another, that form a 
commentary, both cruel and humorous, on the 
evolutionary philosophy current during the last 
century, and quite unjustifiably claiming descent 
from the innocent speculations of Darwin and 
Herbert Spencer. 

Out of this sculpture of Chartres grew the 
very wonderful art of the thirteenth century, 
which gives a sorely diminished glory to the 
Cathedral of Paris and gave, a year ago, a still 
greater glory to that immortal group of churches 
now slowly crumbling under gun-fire. Very no- 
table examples of the transition are at Senlis, 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 241 

but they have been shockingly mutilated, and 
only one of the two wonderful carved lintels still 
gives much idea of its original beauty. The panel 
of the "Resurrection of the Virgin," has all the 
architectural form and the decorative sense of 
Chartres, but it has as well an added human 
quality that makes it enduringly vital and ap- 
pealing. The same can be said of the surrounding 
statues and reliefs that are of the same period, 
and altogether the almost unique work at Senlis 
strikes a singularly happy balance, as sculptured 
architecture, between the rigid formalism of Char- 
tres and Vezelay and the exquisite humanism and 
the almost too-surpassing art of Paris, Amiens, 
and Reims. But for the Revolution Senlis would 
not have stood so alone for sculptural art of the 
transition. Laon once possessed far more, and 
of an even higher type, but all the column figures 
of the west doors, and indeed practically all the 
free-standing statues, were then ruthlessly de- 
stroyed and those that have taken their places 
are merely modern assumptions. The tympana 
of the doors are original, though mutilated: the 
Coronation of the Virgin, scenes from her life, 
the Last Judgment; while in the archivolts and 
around the windows are remains of singularly 



242 HEART OF EUROPE 

beautiful effigies of the wise and foolish virgins, 
the seven liberal arts, episodes from the lives of 
the saints. More or less of the original poly- 
chromatic decoration remains, and the statues 
themselves, even in their battered state, are 
marvels of art. Every trace of archaism and of 
uncertainty is gone, the sculptor works with a 
definiteness and a certainty of touch that are 
amazing, while his sense of the eternally sculp- 
turesque is infallible. Every face — where a face 
remains — is brilliantly characterised; the poses 
are graceful, unaffected, constantly varied; the 
gestures are convincing, the stone quality never 
lost, while there is nothing outside Hellas — ex- 
cept Amiens and Reims — so faultless in its com- 
position of drapery. From the very first this was 
one of the strong points in French sculpture; 
each artist strove for, and attained, not only dis- 
tinction, but naturalism expressed through and 
by an almost classic formalism; the line com- 
position, from Vezelay to Reims, is a succession 
of ever- waxing marvels. At Laon are even now 
mutilated figures that are as perfect in their com- 
position of lines and masses as anything in Athens, 
and the same was true of Reims. Personally I 
have always thought of the figure work at Amiens 




A HEAD, NOW DESTROYED, FROM REIMS 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 243 

(apart from the bas reliefs) as less perfect in this 
respect, in spite of expert opinion, than that of 
Paris, Laon, and Reims ; less brilliantly composed, 
more heavy and realistic, while the figures them- 
selves are certainly not as slender and graceful, 
or so varied in pose. Moissac and Vezelay are 
hieratic abstractions, Chartres pure architecture, 
Soissons a breathing of divine life into ancient 
forms, but Laon and Paris and Reims are pure 
and perfect sculpture against which no criticism 
of any kind can be brought. Never has actual 
life been better expressed through the neces- 
sarily transforming modes of art than here; in 
these exquisite and rhythmical compositions the 
barbarous folly of the naturalistic and realistic 
schools of modern times is made cruelly apparent, 
and the base products of the average nineteenth- 
century practitioners (barring a few exceptions 
such as St. Gaudens at his best, as in the Rock 
Creek figure) become in comparison as absurd 
as do the shameless vulgarities of Bernini and 
his unhappy ilk. 

There still remain at Laon many broken and 
headless fragments, and I do not know where 
anything can be found more complete in every 
sculptural quality. This is a great art at its 



244 HEART OF EUROPE 

highest, and it shows, as Reims once showed, 
that in the early thirteenth century France pos- 
sessed an art of sculpture that could take its place 
unashamed beside the best of the Parthenon. 
Usually one thinks of Gothic sculpture in the 
terms of that late fourteenth-century work so 
easily obtainable from venders of the remains of 
mediaeval art, but this is of a time when a cold 
convention had killed the art itself; when the 
subtle curves of such matchless things as the 
statue of the Virgin from the north door of her 
church in Paris had been distorted into grotesque 
exaggeration; when the thin, close lines of drapery 
had coarsened into triangular spaces of meaning- 
less upholstery, and the sensitive, spiritual faces 
of Reims had given place to fat attempts at a 
stolid pulchritude. This is not art but a trade, 
and it bears no earthly resemblance to the con- 
summate work of a century earlier, when the art 
itself and the religion and the joy and the personal 
liberty behind it were very real things. 

Chronologically, the next great sculpture of 
France is that of the Cathedral of Paris, but as I 
have arbitrarily excluded this city from the survey, 
since one must stop somewhere, while Paris re- 
quires a volume to itself, it is only necessary to 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 245 

say that in spite of the devastations of man 
during six centuries, ending with the dull bar- 
barity of the architect Sufflot, who hacked away 
the trumeau of the great central west door, to- 
gether with a large section of the tympanum of 
the Last Judgment, in order to provide a more 
magnificent means of entrance for processions, 
enough still exists to show the singular mastery 
of the art. As for the statue of Our Lady on the 
north transept, it is one of the finest works of 
sculpture of any time or place, the perfection of 
the drapery finding rivals only in Greece. It is 
interesting to realise that this marvellous work 
antedates Niccolo Pisano by more than a century, 
so that if there still are those who search for the 
origins of sculpture after the great blank of the 
Dark Ages, they must forsake the Renaissance 
and Italy and find what they sought in France 
during the culmination of the Middle Ages. 

At Amiens there is also, over the south portal, 
a figure of the Blessed Virgin, and while it is 
wholly different in spirit from that of Paris, it is 
almost as lovely and even more delicate and full 
of charm. Paris has the majesty and nobility of 
Michael Angelo, with nothing of his high but 
inopportune paganism, but this is like Mino da 



246 HEART OF EUROPE 

Fiesole, with all his daintiness and sweetness of 
feeling, and added to this an almost playful 
humanism that is wonderfully appealing. "Le 
Beau Dieu" of Amiens, on the trumeau of the 
central west door, is almost in the class of the 
Paris Virgin and the sculpture of Reims, and is 
perhaps more nearly a satisfactory showing forth 
of Christ in human form than any other work of 
art in the world. The whole vast church is a 
pageant of carven figures — prophets, saints, apos- 
tles, kings, virtues and vices, symbolical char- 
acters, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, 
the lives of the saints, philosophy, romance — 
every tympanum is carved in bas relief, and the 
wall below the columns of the west portals is set 
with innumerable medallions of the signs of the 
zodiac and the labours of man. Never was there 
such an apotheosis of imagination, and only at 
Reims is there anything a degree finer as art. 
Even there the difference is mostly one of personal 
taste; if you like the lost marvels of Reims better 
than the miraculously preserved wonders of Am- 
iens, well and good; it is for you to say, for both 
are matchless, each after its own kind. How the 
amazing array of carvings and statues at Amiens 
has survived passes the understanding; one would 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 247 

have supposed that its spiritual emphasis, its 
priceless nature, and its singular beauty would 
have subjected it to the sequent attentions of 
Huguenots, Revolutionaries, and the nineteenth 
century, but all have passed it by; and even the 
Prussians in their brief occupation on their way 
to defeat at the Marne had no time to leave their 
mark. Now that Reims is gone, Amiens must 
remain (if it does remain) the great and crowning 
exemplar of Christian sculpture at its highest and 
most triumphant cresting of achievement. 

It is hard to write of the sculptures of Reims, 
or of anything dead and foully mutilated. For 
generations the thousands of carved figures stood 
in their niches growing grey and weather-worn 
through the passing of years — neglected, unnoticed, 
despised — while silly effigies were turned out by 
incompetent bunglers to receive the laudation of 
the haunters of international expositions and 
the galleries of the Salon. Then suddenly a dim 
light showed itself and grew steadily brighter 
until at last, a year or two ago, the consciousness 
became sure that here was one of the very great 
things in the world, one of the few supreme prod- 
ucts of man in his highest and most unfamiliar 
estate, priceless and unreplaceable, as the Par- 



248 HEART OF EUROPE 

thenon or the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 
or the plays of Shakespeare, or the music of Johann 
Sebastian Bach. And the long-delayed knowl- 
edge came to us only to be turned into a memory, 
the new possession was ours only to be taken away, 
and now nevermore for ever can it be granted to 
us to live in and with this perished art, for it is 
gone as utterly as the lost dramas of Sophocles, 
the burned library of Alexandria, the "Last 
Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci. 

"The fool hath said in his heart, 'there is no 
God,'" and the fool hath said in his heart: "I am 
greater and more precious than silly works of 
art." What is the result of this insolence, the 
"Pomeranian grenadier" type of insolence that 
exalts an ignorant, degraded, useless hulk of dull 
flesh and blood over the supreme works of divinely 
inspired men ? Under the lash of industrialism he 
can transform coal and iron into money values; 
he can fight for markets overseas where his mas- 
ters can sell articles no man needs, to people who 
do not want them; he can beget children after his 
own kind, in their turn to do likewise, and finally — 
though this is not the appealing argument to the 
partisans of his essential superiority — he has an 
immortal soul he is doing his best to lose, and fre- 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 249 

quently succeeding to admiration. Are the vile 
types that revealed themselves in rape and murder 
and mutilation in the undefended villages of Bel- 
gium, or those under whose orders they acted, more 
worth saving for further industry of the same na- 
ture than the "Worship of the Lamb" in Ghent 
or the sculptures of the northwest door of Reims ? 
It is an easy argument to offer, the sanctity of 
human life, but it is not the motive behind the 
batteries on the hills to the east of the devastated 
capital of Champagne, month after month pour- 
ing shell on the greatest cathedral that the Chris- 
tianity of the West has reared to the glory of God. 
The motive behind the batteries is an instinctive 
realisation that Reims is a record of human great- 
ness to which the gunners and their masters can- 
not attain, a lasting reproach to inferiority, a 
sermon and a prayer, a menace to bloated self- 
sufficiency and to a baseless pride. Nobility en- 
genders hate as well as reverence, the choice 
depends only on the nature of the man who con- 
fronts it, and there never has been a time in all 
history when decadence did not bring into exist- 
ence a hatred of all fine and noble things that for 
very rage and resentment willed the destruction of 
the dumb accuser. Reims, and what Reims stood 



250 HEART OF EUROPE 

for, cannot exist in the world together with their 
potent and efficient negation; therefore Reims 
perishes, as has perished at similar times in the 
past so much of the record in sublimity and 
beauty of that human superiority which is the 
silent accuser of all spiritual and ethical de- 
generation. 

For the making of the west front of Reims all 
the great masters and craftsmen of France gath- 
ered together, and the sculpture showed not only 
greater excellence than may be found elsewhere, 
but a greater variety in genius and personality. It 
is not that in the doors of this fagade were to be 
found great statues in conspicuous places with 
lesser work all around; every piece of sculpture or 
of carving was a masterpiece of its kind. High 
up in the gables, hidden in the shadows of the 
archi volts, forgotten in odd corners where only 
persistent search would reveal them, were little 
figures or isolated heads as carefully thought out 
and as finely felt as the august hierarchies of the 
front itself. Personality, varied, vital, distin- 
guished, marked the sculpture of Reims, together 
with an unerring sense of beauty of formalised 
line, and an erudition, a familiarity with the 
Scriptures, with scholastic philosophy, with the 




I 



A 



-+mt 



itwiior 




THREE DESTROYED FIGURES FROM REIMS 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 251 

lives of the saints, and with the arts and sciences 
that would appear to do away with the quaint 
superstition that the Middle Ages were a time of 
intellectual ignorance. The men who carved 
these statues were not of the aesthetically elect; 
they were not a few highly trained, well-dressed, 
and supercilious specialists, working in the con- 
fidence born of years in Paris and Rome; they 
were stone-masons, members of their own self-re- 
specting union, who had worked their way up a 
little higher than their fellows and so could carve 
each his group of statues to the satisfaction of 
bishop or abbot or master mason and — which 
was even more to the point — to his own satisfac- 
tion and in accordance with the jealous standards 
of excellence of his guild. He had to know what 
he was doing and what he had to express; there 
was no ubiquitous architect to instruct him, no 
"committee on symbolism" to show him the way, 
and so if he could not read well enough to enjoy 
a modern "yellow journal," or write well enough 
to forge a name or draft a speculative prospectus, 
he did know far more about religion, theology, phi- 
losophy, history, and the contemporary sciences 
and arts and romances than the modern workman 
with his years of public school behind him, or 



252 HEART OF EUROPE 

many an architect or sculptor with his high school, 
preparatory school, and university training behind 
him as well. 

They knew and felt and enjoyed, these sculp- 
tors of Reims, whose work endured for six cen- 
turies and might have lasted six more. Perhaps 
the quality of enjoyment was more clearly ex- 
pressed than anything else. Life was worth 
living to them and they made the most of it, and 
with much laughter. These carved figures at 
Reims and Amiens and Paris show in every line 
the good human joy of doing a thing well, just 
as so much of the output of so much of modern 
industrialism shows the dull indifference or the 
weary disgust for doing a thing ill. No sculptor 
then would have contented himself with making 
a clay model and a plaster cast and then turning 
the execution over to a gang of ignorant day- 
labourers working like banderlogs, only with the 
intelligent assistance of mechanical devices. The 
artist was the craftsman and the art was a craft, 
just as the craft was an art, and the work shows 
it all to those who still can see. Great work, the 
greatest work, if you like; but so far as Reims is 
concerned it is now fire-scorched debris, and for 
its loss we are consoled by the offer of — another 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE 253 

Sieges Allee, perhaps. The world may be for- 
given for thinking that the game is not worth 
the candle. 

During the Hundred Years' War sculpture in 
France froze into a sometimes pleasing but never 
very profitable convention; now and then it had 
great loveliness, as in the statues of the church 
at Brou, but generally it had those qualities 
of exaggeration, affectation, and insincerity to 
which I already have referred. Technically, it was 
always very perfect and sometimes the decorative 
design and the manipulation of the marble were 
almost Japanese in their curious delicacy. Toward 
the end of the century there is an improvement 
owing to the influence of Flanders, then prosper- 
ous and cultured while so much of the rest of 
Europe was spiritually and physically devastated 
by wars, but this later work seemed the particular 
detestation of the reformers, and mostly it is gone, 
particularly in the land of its origin, where reform 
followed by revolution left nothing intact that 
could be mutilated. Little of the work of the two 
great schools of Tournai and Burgundy remains, 
but there is enough to show that if the torch of 
sculptural art had passed in blood and flame from 
the hands of France, it had been seized by the 



254 HEART OF EUROPE 

men of the Netherlands and carried on for two 
centuries at least with little diminution in its radi- 
ance. With the seventeenth century the flame 
was suddenly extinguished and afterward was 
nothing but that type of baroque absurdity that 
still disgraces the undevastated churches with pre- 
posterous marble screens and loud-mouthed, the- 
atrical pulpits, and prancing images of heroic size 
stuck on the columns of nave and choir. 

What the seventeenth century failed to ac- 
complish in the line of these atrocities is scarcely 
worth doing; the grotesque insanity of the con- 
fessionals and pulpits and other woodwork of the 
time passes imagination, and is matched only by 
the misdirected ingenuity and facility of it all. 
The cathedral in Brussels; St. Andre at Antwerp; 
St. Martin, Ypres; St. Pierre, Lou vain, were 
particularly hard hit, but there were few churches 
that did not boast at least a pulpit in a style of 
design that would have looked like a king's coach 
of state had it not more closely resembled a band- 
wagon. St. Gudule in Brussels suffered most of 
all, for it not only possesses a peculiarly irritating 
pulpit of most ridiculous design but its columns 
are disfigured by the impossible statues on gro- 
tesque brackets, while it is disgraced by some of 



GOTHIC SCULPTURE Z55 

the very worst stained glass produced before the 
last quarter of the nineteenth century, when all 
past records were revised. 

When one compares the tawdry horrors that 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries blotted 
almost every church in Flanders and Brabant, 
and compares it, not with the consummate sculp- 
ture and decoration of the great era but even 
with such work of the undoubted decadence as 
the screens of Louvain and Lierre, the impossible 
gulf between the two civilisations becomes pecu- 
liarly conspicuous. When one realises further that 
the black-and-white-marble mortuary horrors in 
the way of screens in Bruges, Antwerp, and Ghent 
exist at the expense of such works of real, if un- 
guarded, art as the screen at Lierre, destroyed to 
give place to their perfumed artifice, the annihila- 
tion of art that has followed its production with 
implacable steps takes on a new poignancy, and 
the continued destruction, now violently in proc- 
ess, becomes even less endurable than before. 



XIII 

THE ALLIED ARTS 

THE debt of Europe to the region we are 
considering is as great in the case of the 
so-called "minor arts" as it is elsewhere. Even 
the language preserves the record: Arras has 
given its name to the tapestries for which it was 
famous, linen woven in regular patterns is called 
diaper, or "linge d'Ypres," cambric is simply the 
product of Cambrai, gauntlet preserves the fame of 
Ghent for its gloves, while the lost city of Dinant 
was once so famous for its work in copper, brass, 
bronze, and gilded metal that during the Middle 
Ages all products of this kind were called dinan- 
derie. Tapestry weaving is, or was, an art es- 
sentially Flemish; illumination, if shared with 
Italy and in a measure every land where there 
were monks and monasteries, reached peculiarly 
notable heights in Flanders, Brabant, and Cham- 
pagne; the casting of bells and the forming of 
them into carillons is peculiarly the province of 
this region, while metal work, whether of gold 
and silver, or of bronze and copper and brass, 

256 



THE ALLIED ARTS 257 

was an art of distinction even from the time of 
Charlemagne. 

It was he that was primarily responsible for 
the beginnings of many of these admirable arts. 
From his capital at Aix, where he had gathered 
all the art and learning he could glean from 
western Europe, went out the influences that 
persisted long beyond his day and that of his 
ill-fortuned dynasty. The Scandinavian tribes 
and the Celts of Gaul had always been craftsmen 
in metals, particularly bronze, and Charlemagne 
used them under the direction of his Roman and 
Byzantine artificers, developing an art that was 
neither one nor the other, but a new Christian 
mode of expression. When toward the close of 
the tenth century the young Princess Theophano 
came from the Bosporus as the bride of Otho II, 
she brought with her other artists, with a treasure 
of Byzantine craftsmanship in weaving, metals, 
enamels, and ivory carving; and a new impulse 
was given, so that, under the direction of a cres- 
cent Christianity, a local and racial art developed 
along many lines and extended itself through the 
whole region and into France, Normandy, Eng- 
land, and Germany as well. From Aix, Arch- 
bishop Willigis and Bishop Bernward carried into 



258 HEART OF EUROPE 

Germany the art of metal working as they had 
learned it, one to Mainz, the other to Hildesheim, 
where their works still remain. To Dinant, Huy, 
and Liege the same impulse was given that later 
extended through Brabant and Flanders. In 
France the beginnings seem to have been at the 
hands of St. Eloi at Limoges and Abbot Suger 
of St. Denis, but it was all within the area to 
which our attention is confined. 

From the time of Charlemagne the production 
of works of art in precious and common metals 
was an ever-increasing industry, lapsing during 
the second Dark Ages, beginning with new and 
unexampled vigour with the great religious revival 
of the first years of the eleventh century. It is 
impossible to form an adequate estimate either 
of the magnitude of the product or the degree 
of concrete beauty that came in these many lines 
of art out of the Middle Ages. For five hundred 
years craftsmen were busy over all that is now 
Rhenish Prussia, Holland, Belgium, France, and 
England, with the Scandinavian countries, Italy, 
and Spain in only a less degree, in producing an 
infinite number of exquisite things for an infinite 
number of churches; metal work of every kind 
and for every conceivable purpose — sacred vessels, 



THE ALLIED ARTS 259 

crosses, crosiers, reliquaries, shrines, tombs, and 
screens; woven tapestries to hang the walls of 
chateaux and cathedrals; embroidered and jewelled 
vestments for an unending series of bishops, 
priests, altars; illuminated volumes whose every 
vellum page was a work of art and whose bind- 
ings were studded with jewels; carved wood and 
ivory in endless designs and for endless purposes; 
stained glass, enamels, tiles. Every church, abbey, 
and cathedral was by the beginning of the Hun- 
dred Years' War as full of works of consummate 
art as the private museum of a modern mil- 
lionaire, and were you to gather together the trea- 
sures of ecclesiastical crafts in the Cluny, the Vic- 
toria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan 
in New York you might have about as much as 
at that time might have been found in a pro- 
vincial cathedral of the second class or a minor 
monastery. In France the sculpture has been 
largely, and the glass partially, saved; in Flan- 
ders many of the pictures; in England a good 
proportion of the churches themselves, but the 
rest is gone, utterly and irrevocably, and we can 
hardly more than dimly imagine from a Gloucester 
candlestick, an Ascoli cope, a Shrine of St. Sebald 
the nature of what has been taken from us. 



260 HEART OF EUROPE 

Even from the first these things had three 
qualities that argued against their preservation, 
the world being what it is. They were intrinsi- 
cally valuable because of their bronze and silver 
and gold and precious gems; therefore in the wars 
that followed the cresting of medievalism they 
were stolen wholesale by one army after another 
and their jewels plucked out, and then they were 
broken up, melted down, and returned to their 
original estate of lumps of bullion, or dead metal, 
all of which had its price. They were the most 
sacred material things possessed by the Church 
that had created them; part and parcel of the 
Catholic sacraments, memorials of the honoured 
dead, caskets for the reverent treasuring of the 
relics of the saints; therefore they were the par- 
ticular object of the blind and furious hatred of 
Protestants, whether Huguenots, Calvinists, Pres- 
byterians, or, in a less degree, Lutherans. They 
were Gothic in their inimitable art, hence anath- 
ema to the bewigged bishops, the worldly priests, 
and, most dangerous of all, the conceited canons 
of the eighteenth century. What the thief over- 
looked the fanatic destroyed, and what he forgot 
the ignorant and vulgar amateur purged away to 
make place for imitation marble and secular 



THE ALLIED ARTS 261 

frippery. After four centuries of this it is a 
wonder that anything remains, and, to tell the 
truth, there is little enough. 

Nevertheless, it is surprising how much of this 
was still in our chosen territory in 1914, and how 
much that is in museums elsewhere came orig- 
inally from the same place. Liege had its ex- 
traordinary bronze font, Hal a font, a lectern, and 
many other treasures of late Gothic and early 
Renaissance art; Louvain, Tirlemont, Xanten, 
Aix, and Treves each had a few pieces of metal 
work of immense artistic value, while in Bruges, 
Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp, in Laon, Noyon, 
Sens, and Reims were a few miraculously pre- 
served shrines, tapestries, vestments, and sacred 
vessels. As for the treasures of the European 
and American museums, the greater part came 
from Flanders, Brabant, the Rhineland, or eastern 
France, for this was the great centre of industry, 
the fountainhead of artistic inspiration. Of the 
"dinanderie" that owed its existence to the in- 
fluence of the four great leaders, St. Eloi, St. 
Willigis, Abbot Suger, and Bishop Bernward, ab- 
solutely nothing remains except the fine group of 
bronze masterpieces by the last at Hildesheim. 
Liege had, however, the extremely important 



HEART OF EUROPE 

bronze font made by Regnier of Huy about 1112, 
and Lille possessed a censer of his workmanship, 
while in Maastricht was a great shrine of gilded 
and enamelled copper set with precious stones; 
the Convent of Notre Dame at Namur and the 
church of Walcourt had no less than eighteen 
specimens of the handicraft of Brother Hugh of 
the great but long ago destroyed Abbey at Oignies 
between the Meuse and the Sambre, representing 
the art of a century later, while later still we had 
the "Chasse de Notre Dame" and the reliquary 
of St. Eleutherus at Tournai, and the shrine of 
St. Gertrude of Nivelles made in 1272. Of the 
vast product of the fourteenth century there are 
a few fragments only, an eagle lectern and a 
great paschal candlestick at Tongres, some crosses, 
reliquaries, monstrances, and candlesticks at Aix, 
Tongres, Furnes, Mainz, Xanten, Bruges, and 
Ghent, but, fortunately it would now seem, the 
greater part of what remains is preserved in the 
museums of Paris and London and therefore safe 
for another period. Outside the museums the 
great treasures were to be found at Sens and Laon, 
the latter being particularly rich, as is proved by 
the fact that the cathedral is said to contain no 
less than eighty reliquaries covering the whole 



THE ALLIED ARTS 263 

period of the Middle Ages. So far as monumental 
tombs are concerned, every church in France has 
been swept clear, chiefly by the Revolutionists, 
not one of the marvellous collections at St. Denis 
and Reims remaining, but in Bruges we still have 
the fine tomb of Mary of Burgundy, of black mar- 
ble encased in a foliated tracery of gilded copper 
and coloured enamels. 

In the bourdons of France and the carillons of 
the Low Countries the art of the metal-worker 
combines with that of music. Both the carillon 
and the English peal are late developments, the 
first of the sixteenth, the second of the seven- 
teenth century, but from the beginning of the 
thirteenth century great bells, used singly or in 
small combinations, were in constant use. Most 
of the latter are gone, melted down in the Hun- 
dred Years' War and the Revolution in France, 
and the wars of religion in the Rhineland and the 
Low Countries, though a few remain at Amiens, 
Sens, Metz, and Beauvais, with one weighing over 
a ton which hung at Reims until last year. The 
carillons of Belgium and Holland were intact 
until that time, though many have now fallen 
with the splendid towers that held them. Arras is 
gone and probably Dunkerque; Louvain and Ypres 



264 HEART OF EUROPE 

are gone and possibly Mons; Malines, most beau- 
tiful of all, has been battered to pieces and its 
forty-five bells have been cracked, melted, hurled 
in ruin down through the many stories of the 
great tower. Time after time during the last 
generation from twenty thousand to forty thou- 
sand people have assembled to hear these bells 
rung by M. Denyn, the greatest master of the 
art, but they will hear them no more until, per- 
haps, when the world is made new the bells of 
Malines may ring out again to welcome the dawn 
of a better day. 

Whether the English peal of an octave, with 
the bells attuned to the intervals of the diatonic 
scale, and swung by hand, a man to each rope, 
in accordance with the most intricate mathemat- 
ical formulas and without recognised melodies, 
is better or worse art than the carillon of thirty- 
five to fifty-two bells, covering sometimes four 
octaves and a half, in accord with the chromatic 
scale, fixed in their head-stocks and struck by 
hammers manipulated by one man sitting before 
a keyboard, and reproducing the most elaborate 
musical compositions, is no part of the argument. 
Each has its place, each is a mode of musical art, 
and just because one may like the strange and 



THE ALLIED ARTS 265 

subtle variations of an English peal thundering 
out its vibrant tones from great bells swinging 
and clashing in a grey old tower, it does not fol- 
low that he must reject the floating and ethereal 
harmonies of the Belgian carillon pouring into 
the still evening air strange melodies that are 
eternally haunting in their poignant appeal. They 
are silent now, even those that still hang in their 
tall towers, and the roar of giant artillery, split- 
ting and harshly reverberating, has taken their 
place. In the good beginnings iron was anathema 
and might not be used in the service of the Church; 
bronze alone was tolerable. Now iron is king 
and holds dominion over the world, transmuted 
into steel through the offices of its ally, coal. 
Bronze is rejected, shattered, dethroned, but 
some of the great bells yet remain, hanging silent 
and patient while hell rages around them and 
iron asserts its universal dominion. Perhaps by 
and by they will give tongue again, proclaiming 
the end of the iron age, calling in once more a 
better and more righteous sovereignty. 

Some day the world will awaken to the fact that 
there are other great arts besides architecture, 
painting, and sculpture; already there is a sus- 
picion abroad that music, poetry, and the drama 



266 HEART OF EUROPE 

are arts also and not merely vehicles for the ex- 
pression of temperament, and there is even a 
preliminary waking of the subconsciousness which 
threatens to confess that ritual and ceremonial 
have been, and may be again, a great fine art in 
the same sense. Little by little the pharisaic 
phrase, "industrial art," is yielding some of its 
component parts and offering them to the very 
superior haute noblesse of fine art, and amongst 
these are stained glass and tapestry. The recent 
discovery of the existence of Chartres Cathedral 
and its glass has settled one point, and much 
against their will the artist and the amateur and 
the commentator have had to admit that the art 
of these windows, and of those at Bourges and 
Le Mans and Angers, is of the highest, and quite 
in the class of the painters of Italy and Flanders, 
the sculptors of France and England (in the Mid- 
dle Ages), and the master builders from Laon to 
Amiens. 

Of this particularly glorious art, which has be- 
come more completely a lost art than any other 
ever revealed to man, there is little in the region 
under consideration. It did not issue from the 
Heart of Europe, but had its beginnings elsewhere 
and its culmination as well. It was an art of 



THE ALLIED ARTS 267 

the twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies, degenerating rapidly after the year 1300, 
and, while the churches and abbeys and cathedrals 
between the Seine and the Somme were once 
splendid with glass that almost rivalled that of 
Chartres, the Reformation and the Revolution had 
seen to it that the major part of this glory had 
been made to depart. Amiens retains a little in 
its chevet chapels, and Reims only a year ago 
was blazing with an apocalyptic splendour that is 
now transformed into gaping and fire-swept open- 
ings, laced by distorted metal bars, and heaps of 
pulverised refuse ground into the blood and ashes 
on shattered pavements. Whatever the Low 
Countries may have had is long since gone the 
way of all the other beautiful things the Calvin- 
ists did not like and only fragments, imitations, 
and Renaissance absurdities remain. 

With the other great art, that of tapestry, the 
case is fortunately different. This was almost the 
intimate art of the Heart of Europe, finding its be- 
ginnings in Aix when the Greek princess brought 
with her from the East the first examples of Byzan- 
tine needlework and weaving that had been seen in 
the West in her day, and going on to new glories 
in Arras, Brussels, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, 



268 HEART OF EUROPE 

Enghien. The perfection of tapestry weaving 
came in the last half of the fifteenth century, but 
the advance was regular for a century before, and 
if we can judge from the few examples left the 
work of the fourteenth century had many fine 
and powerful qualities that were all its own. The 
collapse came suddenly, early in the sixteenth 
century, being marked by Raphael's intrusion 
into a field where he had no place, and after this 
there was no more hope for tapestry than for the 
other arts, and it rapidly sank to the point where 
the products of the Gobelins, Beauvais, and Au- 
bussons looms were much admired. 

If Gothic tapestry had possessed a pecuniary 
value easily translated into cash, or if it had been 
closely associated with the most sacred religious 
things, we should have preserved less than is 
actually the case. As it is, it was seldom the 
victim of cupidity or fanaticism, but by its very 
nature it was perishable, and therefore nearly all 
the work antedating the fifteenth century has 
vanished. Its greatest enemy, however, was the 
ignorant and vulgar culture of the nineteenth 
century, and during the first fifty years of this 
destructive epoch it melted rapidly away. Just 
before the outbreak of the French Revolution it 



THE ALLIED ARTS 269 

is no exaggeration to say that there were in 
France alone enough tapestries to carpet a road 
from Paris to Arras; of course, many were of the 
Gobelins type and comparatively valueless as art, 
but every chateau, every cathedral and monas- 
tery, almost every church had its sets of "arras," 
and these were of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
turies; the curious products of the Renaissance 
were confined to kings, princes, great nobles, and 
to their respective palaces. With 1793 the mas- 
sacre began; everything feudal, even by implica- 
tion, was burned, sometimes just out of pure dev- 
iltry, as when tapestries were consumed in heaps 
at the foot of the "Tree of Liberty"; sometimes 
through thrift, as when in 1797 the Directory 
burned at one time nearly two hundred ancient 
works of art to recover the gold and silver bullion 
— which they did at this one holocaust to the 
value of $13,000. Mr. G. L. Hunter has reckoned 
the value of these destroyed tapestries at about 
$2,500,000 in the market of to-day. At this rate, the 
current value of all the tapestries in France at the 
Revolution would have been about $250,000,000. 
No appreciation of this value developed until 
nearly the end of the nineteenth century. In 
1852 a set of ten, formerly belonging to Louis 



270 HEART OF EUROPE 

Philippe, with a total length of one hundred and 
twenty feet, sold for about $1,200, and at the 
same sale another set of six, running to eighty- 
feet, was bought for $400. At present the in- 
trinsic value of these wonderful creations is quite 
fully appreciated, and any one who can secure a 
fifteenth-century work for less than $300 a square 
yard is fortunate. And yet during the whole of 
the eighteenth century tapestries were ruthlessly 
cut up to form floor rugs, used for packing bales of 
merchandise, or, as at Angers, slashed into strips 
to protect the roots of orange-trees from the cold, 
or nailed on the stalls of the bishop's stable so 
that the episcopal nags might not scar their pre- 
cious flanks. This last outrage, by the way, was 
perpetrated on the unique series of the Apoca- 
lypse, a sequence of panels eighteen feet high 
with a total length of four hundred and seventy- 
two feet, woven in Paris about 1370 from designs 
by Jean de Bruges, court painter to the Emperor 
Charles V, for the use of the Duke of Anjou in 
his private chapel, and at a cost (in the money of 
to-day) of upward of $60,000. They had been 
given to the cathedral by King Rene in 1480, but 
by the beginning of the nineteenth century they 
were quite out of fashion and therefore useless; 



THE ALLIED ARTS 271 

so until a rag merchant sufficiently accommodat- 
ing could be found they were used as noted above 
and finally sold (the opportunity at last offering) 
in 1843 for $60, the purchaser ultimately return- 
ing them to the cathedral when some glimmerings 
of intelligence came back to the ecclesiastical 
authorities. 

When this sort of thing was the rule in France 
and England and Germany for more than a cen- 
tury during which civilisation and culture were 
progressing with such notable rapidity, it is a 
miracle that anything has come down to us, 
particularly when you remember what the Cal- 
vinists and Sansculottes and Reformers did to 
monasteries and chateaux and entire cities in the 
two preceding centuries; but a good deal did so 
come down, including even the poor remains of 
the very much domesticated tapestries of Angers. 
There is only one other fourteenth-century set 
woven at Arras that can positively be identified, 
and that is the series now (or recently) in the 
cathedral of Tournai, though we know from wills 
and inventories that at the beginning of the 
fifteenth century they existed in hundreds. The 
remains of this early work are fine and strong in 
design, powerful as decoration, clear but faded in 



%m HEART OF EUROPE 

colour. With the fifteenth century there came an 
amazing advance, similar to the sudden appear- 
ance of the Van Eycks in painting at exactly the 
same moment. The "Burgundian Sacraments" 
— or what remains — now in the Metropolitan 
Museum as the gift of the late J. P. Morgan, is 
one of the finest examples in existence of this 
earliest of the great periods. Admirable as it is, 
it fails in perfection of beauty before the won- 
derful works of art that immediately followed. 
With the beginning of the fifteenth century 
tapestry weaving came suddenly to a level of 
supreme excellence that places it for a hundred 
years on a level with the other arts, however 
august they may be. Very few of these master- 
pieces remain in Belgium; you must search for 
them in Paris, in London, in Madrid, in New 
York, in the museums of all the world, but the 
search is rewarded by the discovery of an art 
that, however brief its day, was one of the great 
arts of the world. 

Each art has its own medium of expression and 
to this medium it absolutely adheres in its peri- 
ods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, 
working within them, and even making them 
tributary to its excellence. Limitations are, after 



THE ALLIED ARTS 273 

all, the greatest gift of God to man instead of 
being, as the last century feigned, something that 
deplorably existed only to be transcended; with- 
out them man would revert to the condition of 
the jellyfish or the primal ooze of the depths of 
the sea; with them he has an opportunity to 
demonstrate his divine elements through a de- 
velopment that is both in spite of and because of 
the firm lines they draw that cannot be over- 
passed. One of the great things in art is its 
revelation of the possibility of spiritual achieve- 
ment by and through the narrowest physical 
limitations. When, on the other hand, archi- 
tecture tries to assimilate the peculiar methods of 
bridge building; when painting intrudes into the 
province of sculpture, literature, photography, or 
even music; when music becomes mathematical 
or takes to itself the habits of the circus per- 
former; when sculpture deliquesces into a sloppy 
kind of black-and-white illustration; when stained 
glass and tapestry become pictorial; when, in 
fact, all the arts forsake their own provinces and 
deny their own limitations, as they have tended 
to do during the last century, splashing over, the 
one into the other, they cease to be arts at all and 
become unprofitable aberrations. 



274 HEART OF EUROPE 

Only three great arts have come into existence 
during the last two thousand years — music, stained 
glass, and tapestry — and each developed its own 
exact and individual mode of expression. Music 
was as old as architecture, painting, sculpture, 
poetry, and the drama, but under the influences 
of Christianity it gradually transformed itself into 
what was almost a new art and one that has re- 
mained the only vital art through all the un- 
friendly influences of modern civilisation. Stained 
glass was an absolutely new art, taking its rise 
in the twelfth century, culminating in the thir- 
teenth, decaying through the two following cen- 
turies, and entirely disappearing in the eighteenth 
century. It is an art of Christianity, of Frank 
genius, and of the lie de France. Tapestry is 
also a new art, beginning about 1350, culminat- 
ing a century later, dying almost in a day (as a 
great art), about 1520. It also is Christian, but, 
unlike glass, it is primarily secular, and it is ex- 
plicitly and almost exclusively Flemish, the great 
contribution of a distinguished race to the im- 
perishable art of the world. 

It was the glorification of a national industry — 
weaving — and is significant as showing how, under 
wholesome impulses and in a stimulating envi- 



THE ALLIED ARTS 275 

ronment, a simple industry may be transfigured 
and made into art. Its medium was peculiarly 
delicate, subtle, and beautiful, threads of spun 
wool, silk and gold and silver woven by hand 
into a fixed warp of strung threads. These fila- 
ments of silk (as in the finest work) had peculiar 
qualities of beauty, combining both lustrousness 
and depth, while the colours being entirely vege- 
table dyes, with none of the harsh horrors of the 
analine by-products of coal-tar, were infinitely 
varied and of unique richness and soft splendour. 
Fortunately, this new artistic mode was developed 
sufficiently prior to the breakdown of art which 
was signalised by the career of a man in himself 
a very great artist— Raphael — to permit a full 
century of life, and at the hands of a people who 
had a peculiar appreciation of decoration and of 
decorative methods. The result was startling, 
for a new art was born and one of the most dis- 
tinguished quality. As colour decoration the tap- 
estries of Flanders come near being the very 
finest things in the world, although we must judge 
them from a few examples only, the admittedly 
greatest having long since fallen victims to greed, 
fanaticism, and the stolid ignorance of the eight- 
eenth century. Fortunately for the general public, 



276 HEART OF EUROPE 

the remaining masterpieces are now widely scat- 
tered and may be studied with comparative ease, 
the Metropolitan Museum in New York being 
particularly rich and having, either in its own 
name or by loan, the Burgundian Sacraments, 
the matchless "Mazarin" Christ in Glory, the 
almost equally beautiful "Coronation of the Vir- 
gin," as well as scores of others, many of them 
of supreme excellence. 

It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in 
words as it is to do the same by a Chartres win- 
dow. In point of composition the tapestries of 
the fifteenth century are matched only by the 
greatest pictures; even when they are crowded 
with figures there is the most masterly spacing 
of masses, the most consummate balance of form. 
When one realises that in every case the design 
is the work of the members of the guild and not 
of the more famous painters of the time, the 
wonder grows over the apparently universal feel- 
ing for the highest type of artistic expression. 
Compared with the best of the Flemish tapes- 
tries, the boasted and "much admired" composi- 
tion of Raphael in the "Disputa" and the "School 
of Athens," of Michael Angelo in the Sistine 
Chapel, is mathematical and academic. In line 



THE ALLIED ARTS 277 

and line composition there is the same exquisite 
sensitiveness that is almost Greek or Japanese in 
its subtlety and rhythm, while the colour, though 
in many cases faded, is as pure and musical in 
its several tones as it is resonant and splendid in 
combination. And through all this consummate 
mastery and this supreme artistic sense run a 
peculiar charm and distinction that are found 
only in such unique products as the pictures of 
Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, the Lorenzetti, 
Carpaccio, and their kind. Through them you 
enter into a dim and golden fairyland full of wist- 
ful music and haunting memories, where fair 
ladies, courteous knights, delicate- winged angels, 
aureoled saints in blazing dalmatics pass like 
dreams through far countries, "where it is always 
afternoon" and where the land is always lovely, 
the skies serene, the flowers and birds and little 
beasts friendly and well beloved. Chretien de 
Troyes and the troubadours and the Court of 
Love, King Arthur and Roland and King Rene, 
Guenivere, and the gracious queens and gentle 
ladies of all the Middle Ages live again, or rather 
prolong their lives through a passive immortality 
into which whoever understands is welcome to 
enter and sit him down in peace, 



XIV 

ART IN THE RHINELAND 

FROM Charlemagne's ambitious centre at Aix- 
la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture 
went west rather than east, and it is not until 
the eleventh century that we can look for art of 
any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the 
lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough 
elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new 
monasticism calling a new northern blood to ac- 
tion, civilisation began again in Normandy and 
then in the lie de France, its echo in the Rhine- 
land was far and long delayed, and never more 
than an echo at most. There were bad kings 
until the second Crusade and the coming of the 
Cistercians in 1174, and little culture; but from 
then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a 
new impulse in religion and in life, and as a result 
the output of art of all kinds was greatly increased. 
The three elements entering into the new archi- 
tecture were: the revived tradition of the old 
work of the Carolings, much of which still existed 

278 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 279 

in ruinous form, the new ideas brought home from 
Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of 
Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cis- 
tercian monks always exerting their austere and 
reforming influence toward simplicity. 

Many of the earliest examples of this new work 
— at least the earliest now existing — are across 
the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are out- 
side our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, 
are all beyond our territory, but Cologne is this 
side the river and contains some of the most 
organic and best of the late tenth and early 
eleventh century work. Sta. Maria in Capitolio 
and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar type 
of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of 
equal size and semicircular in plan. The central 
tower is supported on four piers made up of groups 
of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse 
and transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the 
main walls being carried on columns, set rather 
close together and carrying round arches. It is 
an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great 
possibilities of development, though it has al- 
most never been used elsewhere; probably it is 
of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by 
early crusaders, though it may be Byzantine, in 



280 HEART OF EUROPE 

which case also it was probably derived from 
Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of 
value to them in the development of the later 
art of Europe. St. Martin's has also a very 
beautiful tower with a high broach spire and 
admirably designed corner turrets. The com- 
position of the church from the east, with its 
curving apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades 
of Lombard form under the eaves, and the grace- 
ful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, 
and the whole building is far more organic and 
logically articulated than the bigger work of a 
century later farther up the Rhine. 

The Church of the Apostles is nearer this 
later type and has its unfortunate agglomeration 
of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is sui generis; 
it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for 
it is made up of a simple little aisleless church 
of three bays with a round apse and two small 
transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular 
decagon of a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, 
with large niches in each of the eight lateral 
sides and a square porch or narthex at the west 
end. This anomalous "nave" is early thirteenth 
century it is true, while the eastern church is 
one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 281 

work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and 
takes the place of a structure of somewhat similar 
plan built by the Empress Helena. The sequence 
is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical 
Roman building, on the foundations of which the 
Empress Helena built her church, the crypt of 
which still remains, then the easterly choir was 
built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh 
century, and finally the original main church was 
torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about 1225. 
In nearly all the Romanesque churches of 
Cologne an attempt has been made to reproduce 
the original polychromatic decoration which once 
covered all portions of the masonry, but the re- 
sults are not eminently satisfactory, for me- 
chanical diaper and stencilling cannot take the 
place of the old work which was done freely and 
without exactness of line and spacing, while the 
colours and the medium used were quite different 
from what is employed to-day. There is no doubt 
that once every Gothic interior, now grey and 
sombre, or garish in its clean whitewash and 
mathematical jointing of painted lines, was en- 
tirely covered with the richest possible surface 
decoration in colours and gold, and the result 
must have been a gorgeousness and a gaiety of 



282 HEART OF EUROPE 

which we know nothing and that would probably 
shock our sensitive taste to the point of hysteria. 
One would like to see some great church with 
full colour decoration, but as matters now stand, 
with oil paint, stencils, coal-tar colours, and all 
that, the experiment could hardly be made with 
any degree of safety. 

In Cologne also are many early, middle, and 
late Gothic churches; that of the Minorites, St. 
Severins, St. Panteleon, St. Andreas, St. Cuni- 
bert; in fact, Cologne is especially rich in churches 
of many styles and most of them remarkably 
good, but they are apt to be overlooked by the 
tourist who can see, and cares to see, only the 
overgrown grandeur of the cathedral. Farther 
up the Rhine we find a long succession of great 
churches which are characteristically German and 
well show the best the Teutonic genius was capa- 
ble of under the highest impulse; Bonn, Coblentz, 
Mayence,, Worms, and Spires are all huge struc- 
tures and quite in a class by themselves. They 
are not beautiful by any stretch of courtesy; big 
they are and massive, with curious combinations 
of multiplied apses and transepts and towers, but 
they are without organic quality of any kind, 
their composition is diffuse and casual, their de- 




WORMS 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 283 

tail crude and uninteresting. Nowhere is there a 
step forward in the development of organism, and 
as they increase in size they show only a multi- 
plication of rather infelicitous parts. Under- 
neath is an idea that was susceptible of develop- 
ment into something fine and national, but it 
never had either the time or the spirit to work 
itself out and so remains a heavy and rather il- 
literate labouring after something too dimly seen 
to be really stimulating in the sense in which the 
ideal in Normandy and France was stimulating. 
Actually there was more of promise in the work of 
the eleventh century, as we see it at Hildesheim 
and Cologne, but this also was left undeveloped 
and never worked out its inherent possibilities. 

The architectural development of Germany be- 
gan too late; it was always a full century behind 
France and Italy, and when the Rhenish people 
were hammering away at their clumsy and un- 
inspired giants of masonry that never seemed to 
become anything else and never produced any 
elements of novelty or progress, either structur- 
ally or aesthetically, Normandy already had struck 
out those masterpieces of crescent vitality, Ju- 
mieges and the abbeys of Caen, while France 
was well along the highroad of her consummate 



284 HEART OF EUROPE 

Gothic, through St. Denis, Noyon, Laon, and 
Paris. 

This backwardness in the acceptance of civili- 
sation has always worked against the attainment 
of the highest levels of culture by that portion of 
the Germanic nation north of the Danube and 
east of the Rhine, while it has given it a certain 
advantage in the achievement of material ends, 
since the ethical and religious considerations, that 
in a measure held elsewhere, were naturally lack- 
ing. No part of this wild land of savage and 
heathen tribes ever felt the touch of Roman 
civilisation, such as it was, and it was the last 
part of central Europe to be Christianised. The 
Bavarians, Burgundians, and Franks all accepted 
Christianity at the end of the fifth century, but 
the tribes between the Rhine and the Weser were 
heathens for another three hundred years. The 
Wendish lands (where Berlin now is) did not 
come into Christian Europe until the early 
eleventh century, at about the time, let us say, 
of Duke Richard of Normandy and the founding 
of the great abbeys and schools of Bee, Fecamp, 
and Jumieges; Pomerania (where the grenadiers 
come from) was converted after a fashion a hun- 
dred years later still, in the days of the highest 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 285 

civilisation in Europe, but Prussia was the last 
of all, and when Christianity was preached in its 
arid plains and amongst its stubbornly heathen 
peoples Reims cathedral was rising into its sublime 
majesty, marking the high attainments of almost 
eight centuries of cumulative Christian culture. 

Even in the Rhineland, however, there was 
something lacking to that culture that always 
has issue in great architectural art; many things 
were started but none was ever finished. The 
school of Cologne gave place to the Rhenish 
fashion and this was suddenly abandoned for 
Gothic after it had been raised to its highest 
point in France and was at the very moment of 
decline. Neither Cologne nor Strasbourg is of the 
same quality of perfection as Bourges or Amiens 
or Reims; indeed, they both fall immeasurably 
short, and though later, across the Rhine, in Frei- 
bourg, Erfurt, even as far afield as Vienna, Teu- 
tonic blood was to begin a new coursing through 
veins already hardening, again there was to be 
no culmination and the Renaissance was accepted, 
ready-made, as it came from France and Italy. 

Cologne is a magnificent essay in premeditated 
art, and it has certain qualities of almost over- 
powering grandeur that are wholly its own; the 



286 HEART OF EUROPE 

west front with its vast towers is a masterpiece 
of consistent design, but it is so knowing and 
academic that it misses the inspiration accorded 
to more modest and God-fearing master builders, 
while the interior is wire-drawn and metallic and 
quite without the infinite grace and subtlety of 
the best French or even English work. Of the 
sense of scale it has little or nothing, its detail 
is of a cast-iron quality, and altogether it seems 
like a very successful nineteenth-century essay in 
academic design. 

Of course, much of what we see is modern; the 
choir is fairly early for Gothic in Germany, hav- 
ing been begun in 1248 and finished just seventy- 
five years later; the transepts followed at once, 
and the lower portion of the nave, but interest 
died out and some time during the fifteenth cen- 
tury work completely stopped. During the Re- 
naissance nothing was done except to mess up 
the forlorn interior with pseudo-classic ineptitudes, 
and finally the Revolutionists came over to turn 
the whole thing into a storage place for hay. 
In 1823 royalty conceived the scheme of restor- 
ing the ruin and completing the entire design in 
accordance with certain original plans which had 
been preserved. It is said, possibly with truth, 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 287 

that the first architect, Master Gerard, sold his 
soul to the devil as the price for these same plans, 
and if so he would perhaps have done better had 
he followed the practice of the master masons of 
a century earlier in France, who preferred to deal 
with other spiritual powers and not on the basis 
of trade. However this may be, the work went on 
at the expense of all Germany, and was finally 
completed in 1880, at a cost of some five millions 
of dollars. 

As it stands, then, it is largely the work of res- 
toration and of nineteenth-century talent; hence, 
if in the fortunes of war it should be subjected 
to the hail of shell and shrapnel from French 
and British batteries, so working out the hard 
old Israelitish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth 
for a tooth, and suffering even as Reims has suf- 
fered, the world would look on with far different 
sentiments since, apart from its windows (some 
of them) and pictures and tombs, nothing would 
be lost that could not be replaced and after a 
better fashion; for after all when you say the 
most you can for the nineteenth century it will 
generally be admitted that, even in Germany, it 
was not a stimulating era so far as creative or 
even archaeological Gothic art is concerned. 



288 HEART OF EUROPE 

Strasbourg is much more interesting and poetic, 
with great refinement and originality in design, 
though its taste is far from impeccable, its struc- 
tural sense gravely deficient. The tendency is 
wholly toward lace-like and fantastic design, but 
it has little resemblance to the late French flam- 
boyant with its curving and interlacing lines; 
instead, it is more suggestive of the English per- 
pendicular, with its scaffolding of vertical lines 
applied to, but not a part of, the basic fabric. 
It has no consistency of plan, for the eastern end, 
with its semicircular apse and portions of its 
transepts, is of a singularly noble type of twelfth- 
century Romanesque, while the nave is mid- 
thirteenth century and the tower and upper 
portion of the west front are a hundred years 
later. Confused as it is, there is an extraordinary 
charm about it all, for every part is personal and 
distinguished, full of novel and poetic ideas and 
all kinds of unaffected touches of genius. The 
wonderful colour of the exterior and the singularly 
fine glass of the interior have much to do with its 
general effect of a delicate mediaeval loveliness 
that makes amends for its architectural short- 
comings. 

Of the castle architecture of the Rhine there is 




STRASBOURG 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 289 

little left from the mediaeval period from which 
one can gain an adequate idea of its excellence, 
which was probably great. As in Luxembourg, 
everything has been shattered into wildly pictur- 
esque ruins which are outside the category of 
architecture, and such Renaissance work as Heidel- 
berg is quite as far without the same category, 
though for another reason; here even picturesque- 
ness of site and dilapidation cannot make amends 
for ignorance, assurance, and excruciating taste. 
As a matter of fact, the best architecture of the 
Rhine is the domestic building of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, the half timber, many- 
gabled structures that give the little Rhine towns 
a charm that is unexcelled and testify to the native 
sense of beauty in the common people, when they 
were left alone and not confused by the self-satis- 
fied and ill-bred interference of the connoisseur. 

If Christian culture began too late along the 
Rhine to find a great expression in architecture, 
the same is not true of painting, which followed 
after and achieved much that the older art could 
not accomplish. The Teutonic tribes of the 
Rhine had always excelled in certain virtues of 
frugality, temperance, domestic morality, and a 
righteous revolt showed itself here against the 



290 HEART OF EUROPE 

corruption of the Church and society in the four- 
teenth century that followed the first down- 
ward trend of medievalism. Early in the cen- 
tury men and women began to draw away from 
a world with which they had little sympathy, 
striving for personal righteousness, the sense of 
an inner relation to God, the attainment through 
mystical means of escape from the devastating 
wars, the pestilence and famine, the favouritism 
and cupidity and licentiousness of the Church. 
The centre of these mystical brotherhoods was 
Cologne, particularly at the end of the fourteenth 
and the beginning of the fifteenth century, and 
it is not a mere coincidence that here at Cologne 
also, and at the same time, a new school of paint- 
ing should come into existence, exactly as had 
happened a few years earlier in Siena and Flor- 
ence. There had been great wall painting for 
several centuries, but it had always been an es- 
sential part of architecture, hieratic, formal, 
monumental, impersonal; now the new spiritual 
impulse was to work out an original and very per- 
sonal form of expression on the basis of these ear- 
lier works, but at smaller scale and with a minute 
craftsmanship borrowed partly from the gold- 
smiths' work and the enamels for which Cologne 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 291 

already was famous; partly from the exquisite 
illumination of the vellum volumes of the time. 
It was somewhere about 1350 that Master Wil- 
helm, who holds the same place in the north 
that was attained by Cimabue in the south, was 
born. His pictures are rare but there is one of 
great value in Cologne cathedral, the "St. Clara 
Triptych," and it shows all the elements now at 
work toward the development of the new art, 
the fine and masterly line and composition, with 
a strong rhythmic sense taken over from the fully 
developed wall painting of the preceding century, 
the delicate craftsmanship of the goldsmith, the 
illuminator, or the worker in enamels, and the 
extraordinary personal quality, the direct human 
appeal, that was furnished by the mystical seekers 
after union with God through a direct relation- 
ship outside the formalised institutions and prac- 
tices of the Church. You get the quality best of 
all perhaps from the "Madonna of the Bean- 
flower' ' in the Cologne Museum, another picture 
by Master Wilhelm, and as lovely and personal 
as one could ask. There are also the "Paradise 
pictures," equally human and even more mystical; 
visions of delicate and gracious gardens, where 
youths and ladies and children and angels all 



292 HEART OF EUROPE 

mingle in the midst of flowers and singing around 
the Queen of Heaven herself; efforts, one might 
think, to create a paradise for the imagination, 
where one could escape from the too numerous 
horrors of a none too accommodating world. The 
more specifically devotional pictures are very 
numerous and generally anonymous; painters 
then were craftsmen, members of guilds devoted 
to the upbuilding of the highest standards of work- 
manship, and caring little for their own personal 
fame. Picture exhibitions and competitions for 
prizes and medals were also unknown, which made 
a difference. In all these works is the same sweet 
humanism, the invariable personal appeal, and it 
is easy to understand that a new art such as this 
must have been a wonderful boon to a weary and 
disappointed generation. 

The Teuton had at last found a field for the 
expression of that aesthetic sense that was one of 
the inalienable possessions of man down to the 
nineteenth century, and he made the very best 
of it, as he was to make the best of the still newer 
art of music a few centuries later. The world 
wanted this new art, and from Cologne it spread 
rapidly to the west into Flanders and Brabant, 
and south to Franconia and Suabia. To the 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 293 

school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, 
he could hardly have been what he was but for 
Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he 
added something of his own Flanders, and more 
of himself, and the art he initiated rose immea- 
surably above its source. 

In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and 
congenial form of expression, but this art de- 
veloped rather to the north and east of the Rhine. 
Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was 
here that Bishop Bernward gathered or educated 
his amazing craftsmen in bronze. Where such an 
artist came from, as he who made the cathedral 
doors and the bronze column, heaven alone knows, 
for it was early in the eleventh century that 
these came into existence. They began a school, 
however, that continued in Saxony for many cen- 
turies and had its influence over all Germany. 
The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in 
the cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that 
defy comparison. The great school of sculpture 
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that 
which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz 
Mountains, not only in Hildesheim but Halber- 
stadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naum- 
bourg, the masters of Magdebourg ranking with 



294 HEART OF EUROPE 

those of Amiens and Reims. Undoubtedly there 
is French influence here, perhaps through the 
training, under the masters of France, of the 
craftsmen who later went back to their native 
lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the 
French influence is even more clearly seen but 
here it is rather in the line of the more southerly 
schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find that 
singular and ingenious masterpiece, the "Pillar 
of the Angels," slender grouped shafts with 
intermediate niches, one above the other, each 
containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an 
angel, or, at the top, our Lord at the Day of 
Judgment. This is one of those sudden and un- 
precedented happenings in mediaeval art that mark 
the vast vitality, imagination, and personal initi- 
ative of the time. It has no progenitors, no suc- 
cessors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the 
masterpiece of one Ervin de Steinbach, who ap- 
pears to have been the architect for the later 
portions of the cathedral. 

Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture 
seems never to have been a favoured art in the 
Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains 
its chief claim to honourable record, though stained 
glass reached considerable heights, as is seen both 



ART IN THE RHINELAND 295 

at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on definitely 
local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish 
schools of art of all kinds had succeeded by their 
sheer achievement in establishing their dominant 
influence along the Rhine, and with the Renais- 
sance the fingering elements of an instinctive 
practice of beauty quite died away. 



XV 

THE FOREST OF ARDEN 

WHERE the immemorial Forest of the Ar- 
dennes closes in on the Moselle that winds 
beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land 
that can give us small aid in the way of art, for 
the hand of man and of an implacable fatality 
has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a 
place of infinite charm and of significance as well, 
while in the last year its ancient name has come 
into the light again, even as it was some centuries 
ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged 
many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the 
kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, 
Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman 
Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and 
Austrian), France again, both of the republican 
and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous 
Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but con- 
centrated state, an independent but sovereign 
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the 
moment in dark fastnesses of oppression where- 

296 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 297 

from no word issues forth, but destined under 
God to a triumphant release and to a restoration 
that may mean a return to earlier and wider 
frontiers. 

Luxembourg means that portion of the Heart of 
Europe lying between the Meuse and the Moselle, 
and one line drawn from Limbourg to Treves, 
another from Verdun to Metz. It is now a tithe 
of this, but who can say what may be in the fu- 
ture ? All its great northern portion has for long 
been incorporated in the eternally honourable 
kingdom of Belgium, and there it will remain, but 
there is always the old Archbishopric of Treves 
with its Moselle valley, and there are the lands 
along the Saar and the new (and old) frontiers of 
France. At present, as a result of three treaties 
in which it played the passive part of victim, it 
is a fourth the size it once had under its first 
Duke Wenceslas; the first section was lost in 
1659, the second at the Congress of Vienna in 
1815, the third and largest at London in 1859, 
but, as a Japanese guide remarked at the monas- 
tery of Horiuji, "The quality is not dependent 
on the numerality of quantity,' ' and as nothing 
was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the 
people remained intact and merely concentrated 



298 HEART OF EUROPE 

itself still more intensely within its shrunken 
borders. 

Luxembourg lies along that line where first 
the Teuton blended with the primitive Gaul, or 
Celt, and where a second mingling later took 
place between the result of the first — the Salian 
Frank — and the same old Teutonic stock. It is 
the mating-place of races and therefore the fight- 
ing-place as well, and always will remain so, as 
they and we now realise only too clearly. They 
were far enough apart, these Celts and Germans, 
to guarantee good progeny. The Gaul was huge 
of stature, blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes 
and golden chains. He was pastoral and agri- 
cultural, aristocratic in his social and political 
systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tem- 
pered, superstitious, Druidical. The Teuton was 
red-haired, shaven except for a fierce top-knot, 
grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture 
and of everything else except fighting; as a youth 
he wore an iron collar which could not be re- 
moved until he had killed his man. Politically he 
was ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and 
chaste; theologically, monotheistic. From the fu- 
sion of these two elements came the many tribes 
of Gallia Belgica, and in good time most of the 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 299 

peoples of the Heart of Europe, of Flanders, 
Brabant, Luxembourg, Lorraine, the hither Rhine- 
land, Champagne, Burgundy, Picardy, Artois. 
Treves, head city of the Treveri, was the natural 
capital and so it became under the Caesars when 
they had made their wilderness and called it 
peace. 

It did not remain a wilderness long; presently 
came the pacific Caesars of a later day and the 
whole land became first the " kitchen-garden of 
Rome" and then the Newport of the Empire. 
Fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land 
was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly 
the whole region was a garden dotted with private 
parks and estates. Treves was made a great 
city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, 
the summer capital of Europe and second in Gaul 
only to Lyons. A city of manifold pleasures 
and as many beauties; rich, sumptous, sensuous, 
where from the shores of Tiber and Bosporus 
enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of 
living came to cool themselves and restore their 
vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys 
of this curiously picturesque retreat. All along 
the Moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms 
of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar 



300 HEART OF EUROPE 

and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and 
cool groves and wide-spreading parks. A golden 
day-dream focussed along the windings of a little 
river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to en- 
dure for ever. 

And then the greater dream of empire began to 
turn into nightmare. The Gallic legions re- 
volted against a weakening hand in Rome, and 
Caesars of a day and a thousand votes fought 
back and forth over the land, and burned and 
murdered and died until peace came again, and 
restoration, with real emperors refreshing them- 
selves in their imperial city of Treves and their 
dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding 
Moselle. War again, and ruin, this time of a 
nature to last for generations and to leave the 
marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of 
trees and vines and moss. Out of the terrible 
east the Huns came like a flood with the deadly 
Attila at their head, blind terror before them, 
death and silence behind. Just to the west, at 
Chalons, they were beaten back and fled east- 
ward again (men thought for ever), and what was 
left became part of the new Frankish kingdom. 
Of the makers of this nation and the stock from 
which sprang Merovings, Carolings, and most of 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 301 

the other royal houses of Europe, the Reverend 
T. H. Passmore writes engagingly thus: 

The record of this people, until the close of the fifth 
century, is dim and discursive. Up to that time they were 
more like a firework display than a people. They appear 
and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the 
only unifying condition being a general and most sacred 
sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the 
universe. The first head upon which history steadily 
focusses its light is that of the great Clovis. He was lord of 
the small Salian tribe in Batavia and sacked and plundered 
all around him to such an extent that the other Frankish 
tribes who lived along the Belgic rivers were smitten with 
admiration and flocked to the standard of so virtuous a 
prince. . . . The pious Clovis was a born diplomatist. 
He was a sanguinary Teuton, a cultured Roman, and a 
Christian saint according to circumstances. He was great. 

After clearing Gaul of the Burgundians and other Ger- 
mans who still barred his progress, and wiping out the Ale- 
manni — those chronic foes whom Rome had found invincible 
— Clovis listened to the prayers of his Christian wife, Clotilde, 
and was baptised in Rheims Cathedral by St. Remigius with 
three thousand of his devoted Franks, who would probably 
have heard of it again had they made any trouble about 
the matter. He does not seem, however, to have grown any 
nicer or kinder on this account. St. Gregory of Tours, his 
biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly 
endowed with the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on 
one occasion, after dismissing with prayer a synod of the 
Gallican Church, he quietly proceeded to butcher all the 
Merovingian princes. Having pushed his arms into France, 
he fixed on Paris as his royal seat; conquered the Goths 
under Alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was invested 



302 HEART OF EUROPE 

with purple tunic in St. Martin's church at Tours. Twenty- 
five years after his death the Emperor Justinian generously 
bestowed on his sons the provinces of Gaul, which they al- 
ready possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabi- 
tants from their allegiance to himself, which had only existed 
in his own august imagination. Thus the French kingdom 
of the Merovingians, to the generation succeeding Clovis, 
already included all Gaul from western France to the 
Rhine and their suzerainty reached to the Alps and beyond 
them. 

Luxembourg had long been Christian after a 
fashion; the first Bishop of Treves had been ap- 
pointed by St. Peter himself, while the Emperor 
Constantine, who had lived much in the city, 
fostered the new religion in every way. Later, at 
the time of the era-making Pepin of Heristal, St. 
Willibrord came from England on his great mis- 
sion to the heathen of Friesland, and while con- 
verting them, and much of Norway and Denmark 
to boot, established here at Echternach a great 
monastery that was his spiritual power-house, 
from which he drew the energy that sent him on 
his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, 
for the winning of souls to Christ. He did his 
work well, none better, and wherever he went 
Christianity went with him, and a new civilisa- 
tion, a new culture, that remained for many cen- 
turies after he had been called to his high reward, 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 303 

buried in his dear abbey at Echternach and en- 
rolled in the Kalendar of Saints. 

It was a vast monastery and a magnificent one, 
but it is a monastery no longer; for centuries 
it continued to pour out from its inexhaustible 
Benedictine store, missionaries, prophets, priests, 
leaders and protectors of the people; fostering 
education, agriculture, the arts; establishing order, 
nursing a piety that found its reward in this world 
through the consciousness of an ever-widening 
civilisation, and a greater reward in heaven. 
Then the power and wealth grew too great for 
the equanimity of princes, and it was robbed by 
one after another, oppressed by lay abbots in 
commendam, its Benedictine monks driven out 
and secular canons intruded, and finally pillaged 
by recreant bishops of the new dispensation of 
humanism and enlightenment, and by that con- 
centration and apotheosis of the same, Le Roi 
Soleil, and so handed over to the emissaries of 
the deluge that followed him, the attractive ex- 
emplars of revolution, who swept the place clean 
of books and pictures and statues and all the 
hoarded art of a thousand years — yes, even of 
the poor ashes of the good saint himself — to 
make place a half century later for the ashes and 



304 HEART OF EUROPE 

slag of blast-furnaces set up within the ancient 
walls, and for the housing of soldiers and their 
mounts. 

Still, the work could not wholly be undone, 
Luxembourg was a Christian state and so it re- 
mained, through fair days and foul, the fairest 
being perhaps those when, united to Flanders and 
Brabant under the Emperor Maximilian, it fell 
into the charge of that great lady and unofficial 
saint, Margaret "of Malines," whose story I have 
tried to tell elsewhere. 

With the wars of religion this peace and pros- 
perity came to an end and for two hundred years 
all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of 
Europe, from those of Francis I to the obscene 
hordes of the French Republic. It had never 
revolted against the Catholic religion nor against 
its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and 
savage extermination. Cities were burned and 
their names forgotten; great abbeys and churches 
like those of Orval and Clairefontaine were utterly 
extinguished; tall castles that crowned every 
height of land were blown up with gunpowder; 
fields and farms became waste land; and through 
starvation, massacre, and exile the population 
was reduced to a tithe of its former numbers, and 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 305 

at last, by the republic that came to bring liberty, 
taxed into an all-engulfing penury. 

The era of enlightenment had not been wholly 
happy in its action on Luxembourg, but it was 
free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it re- 
mained until that memorable day in August, 
1914, the day of broken treaties, when the little 
Grand Duchess backed her motor-car across the 
bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the 
vain protest of honour against a force that did 
not recognise the meaning of the word or the 
existence of the thing it signified. 

Luxembourg to-day is not a place where one 
may go to revel in the artistic memorials of a 
great past; the great past is there, and its memory 
is still green, but even more than Brabant or 
Champagne has it borne the grievous harrowing 
of endless wars and recrudescent barbarisms, not 
the least destructive of these visitations being 
the nineteenth century in its satisfying complete- 
ness, which saw many an abbey and old haunted 
castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and 
carted away for the value inherent in its raw 
material, or turned to inconceivably base uses 
from all of which some pecuniary profit might be 
obtained. Once it was as rich in enormous castles 



306 HEART OF EUROPE 

as any country in the world that happily has a 
mediaeval past. Bourscheid on its great hill, 
lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of 
vast crags of masonry, in spite of all that man 
could do; Brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its 
ring of mountains; Esch, split into towering and 
sundered fragments on the raw cliffs overhang- 
ing the Sure; Hollenfel, Clervaux, spared by war 
to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of 
owners who preferred pseudo-Gothic villas with 
all modern conveniences; Beaufort, with its noble 
proportions and its beauty of a later and more 
gracious medisevalism; Vianden, most fascinating 
of all with its dizzy gables, and its chapel still in- 
tact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings. 
And every castle ruin is haunted to heart's desire, 
crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent 
habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar 
joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could 
not believe in the impossible and promptly dis- 
counted the improbable. Any peasant in Luxem- 
bourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the 
whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight 
prowlings of an entire population of delectable 
phantoms, while the stories and legends of their 
commerce in the past with lords and ladies and 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 307 

knights and monks and bishops form a literature 
in themselves. 

In spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite 
and unfamiliar charm; a land of wide and high 
plateaus cut by many winding river courses, each 
a possible journey of varying delights. Our and 
Sure and Black Erenz; Alzette and Clerf and 
White Erenz, with many others of minor flow, 
cut the duchy in every direction, all at last find- 
ing the goal of their waters in the magical Moselle, 
as it flows past old Roman Treves on its devious 
way to the Rhine. And it was a kind of little 
earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its 
well-earned peace. A land of farms and gardens 
and pastures, of contented little villages and 
river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted 
people. Coal and iron have left little mark, 
though the efficient Baedeker (to whom shall we 
go for guidance on our journeys in the long days 
to come?), in one of his concise and unpremedi- 
tately dramatic paragraphs does say: "18J^ M. 
Weilerbach, for the iron-foundry of Weilerbach 
and the former summer-house of the Abbots of 
Echternach, magnificently situated amidst wood" 
— an antithesis of startling illumination. Protes- 
tantism passed it by, except for purposes of plun- 



308 HEART OF EUROPE 

der, and it has always been unanimously and 
enthusiastically Catholic, with a record for public 
and private morality that puts any and every 
other part of Europe to sudden shame. 

What is to be its future when the great storm 
that is cleaning the soiled world of its dust and 
ashes of false ideals and burnt-out superstitions 
sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is 
only in its darkness the promise of a new day? 
Who shall say? but any one can weave his vision, 
and to some it already appears that, with the 
meting out of inadequate earthly reward for ir- 
reparable bodily suffering, will come the lands to 
the east as far as the Kyll, with to the south 
Saarbourg, and the far side of the Moselle to the 
Hochwald, including ancient Treves, no longer a 
forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a greater 
and better and more potent Hague, a central 
city of Europe and of peace, where, under the 
united guarantees of all the states, is permanently 
sitting a great council of ambassadors for the de- 
vising of measures of common interest, the adjust- 
ment of international differences, the preservation 
of a righteous peace between nations, and with 
authority to suppress any violation of treaties or 
any wilful aggression of one state against another, 



THE FOREST OF ARDEN 309 

by calling into the field against the offender all 
the military and naval forces of all the other 
powers signatory to an European Treaty of Per- 
manent Peace and represented in the council of 
ambassadors. 

Or perhaps Treves, with surrounding territory 
within a five-mile radius, might be erected into 
an international city of council, surrounded by 
Luxembourg, Belgium, which may be extended to 
the Moselle and eastward half-way to the Rhine, 
France, the new frontiers of which would be the 
old eastern borders of Alsace and Lorraine, and a 
restored Palatinate limited to the north and east 
by the Rhine and the Moselle. Central in this 
circle of guarding states, with all Europe for added 
defence against any possible recrudescence of local 
egoism in any place, Treves might again become a 
great city of refuge and of Christian righteousness, 
with noble buildings on its circle of surrounding 
hills, a centre of religion and education and mercy, 
guardian of the peace of Europe, a living and 
glorious symbol of the world enlightenment that 
came through the clean purging of a war greater 
than all former wars because the need was greater. 



XVI 

EX TENEBRIS LUX 

1 HAVE tried to give some idea of the contri- 
■*■ butions of the lands and the peoples in the 
western theatre of the war in certain of the fields 
of art; to note the development of culture, the 
direction of human happenings, the bearing of 
great men and women who were leaders in Europe, 
through an abbreviation of historical records, to 
justify the giving to the region between the Seine 
and the Rhine, the Alps and the sea, the name of 
"Heart of Europe." Such a survey of such a 
territory must, of necessity, be superficial and in- 
complete, for too many and wonderful things 
happened there to be recorded in a volume of 
limited extent. Chiefly, I have spoken of what 
could be, and is being, destroyed, but there is 
much else that is not subject to annihilation at 
the hands of furious men, the contributions to 
music, to letters, to the slow-growing spiritual 
deposit in society through philosophy, theology, 

and religion. 

310 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 311 

In music alone the Heart of Europe has done 
more, and at different times, than any similar 
area. While the troubadours of the twelfth 
century came into existence in the sunny lands of 
Languedoc, it was in Aquitaine, Champagne, and 
Flanders that the trouveres developed the norm 
of the troubadours "into something rich and 
strange," and under the Countess Marie of Cham- 
pagne created that beautiful and potent fiction 
of "courteous love," which had issue in so many 
exquisite phases of human character and made 
possible a great school of romantic poets. They, 
under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made 
for the Countess Marie, out of the rude elements 
that had come from England and Wales through 
Brittany, the great poems and romances of King 
Arthur and his knights. The greatest of the 
trouveres was Adam de la Hale and he was born 
in Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, how- 
ever, Gottfried of Strasbourg, a contemporary of 
Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale of 
Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless 
poems of the world, as Wolfram von Essenbach 
of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart 
from the story of Parsifal. 

Very slowly in the meantime music had been 



312 HEART OF EUROPE 

working out its wonderful growth from the clas- 
sical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory inter- 
mingled with the instinctive folk-music of the 
south, and in the fourteenth century the leader- 
ship fell full into the hands of Flanders, where 
monks and laymen set themselves to the con- 
genial task of building up a new and richer music 
on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was 
at work about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons 
and died in 1460; Dufay, born in Hainault and 
trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, to- 
gether with the English Dunstable, potent leaders 
in the great work, laying well the foundations on 
which a few centuries later was to be erected the 
vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and 
his successors. In the second period, that of 
the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp be- 
came the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, 
the leader in the intellectual ising of music and 
the establishing it on methodical lines, while in the 
third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the 
beginning of the following century, Josquin des 
Pres led the course back toward a purer beauty, 
though through modes that were increasingly 
clever in their elaborate virtuosity. After this 
the lead passed across the Rhine, with memorable 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 313 

results a century later, when the great cycle, 
from Bach to Brahms, rounded itself into a per- 
fect ring. 

The era-making movements in religion all be- 
gan outside our territorial limits at Monte Cas- 
sino, Cluny, Clairveaux, but it was through St. 
Benedict of Aniane that Charlemagne at Aix-la- 
Chapelle effected his regeneration of the Church 
and his initiation of a new Christian education 
and culture ; St. Bruno, of Cologne, sometime head 
of the cathedral school of Reims, was the founder 
of the Order of Carthusians; St. Chrodegang, 
Archbishop of Metz, brought into existence the 
Canons Regular of St. Augustine, who introduced 
into cathedral chapters the order and discipline 
of monasticism; St. Norbert, of Xanten, created 
the Order of Premontre, one of the most benef- 
icent and beautiful of the religious brotherhoods 
of the Middle Ages, while the "Imitation of 
Christ," the most purely spiritual and devotional 
work of the time, was the product of Thomas a 
Kempis, an obscure monk of the Netherlands. 
In the development of Christian mysticism the 
Rhine valley stands pre-eminent, though the 
greatest of all those of this school of combined 
thought and vision was Hugh of St. Victor, of 



314 HEART OF EUROPE 

the monastery of Augustinian Canons in Paris, 
on the banks of the Seine, where now is the Jardin 
des Plantes. The ancient tradition is that he 
was born near Ypres, though recent researches 
seem to indicate that he may have been a son of 
the Count of Blankenburg in Saxony. In any 
case, he was the great expositor of sacramental 
religion and philosophy as Charlemagne's Rad- 
bertus Paschasus was the great defender of the 
true doctrine of Transubstantiation. If, indeed, 
Hugh of St. Victor was a product of Flanders, then 
the credit goes there of having given birth to one 
of the noblest and most penetrating minds the 
world has known, one that ranks with that great- 
est pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. 
Whether one accepts the mysticism of the 
Rhine or not does not matter; it was a potent 
element in the flowering of Christian piety and 
the development of Catholic theology, and Eliza- 
beth of Schonau, Hildegarde of Bingen, Mary of 
Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magde- 
bourg, are all names that connote a poignancy of 
spiritual experience that proves both the personal 
exaltation of the time and the quality of the blood 
that had issue in character such as theirs. This 
mystical vision of the holy women of the Rhine 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 315 

is simply an extreme intensification of the same 
vision that was given in lesser measure and in 
different ways to all the creative artists, philoso- 
phers, and theologians of the Middle Ages, from 
Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of 
the thirteenth century, and it had a great part 
in determining and fixing the artistic manifesta- 
tion of this amazing time. Both as a result and 
an influence it is vastly important and not to be 
ignored. Out of it came much of that marvellous 
symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so ex- 
plicitly set forth by the monk Durandus and 
Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good offices here 
alone the world owes it a deep and lasting grati- 
tude. 

One is tempted to go on through other fields 
where the harvest is plenteous, but an end must 
be made, and it is here. There remains the ques- 
tion of the issue of it all — whether out of this latest 
devastation that so adequately follows those of 
the nineteenth century, of the French Revolu- 
tion, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, 
of the Hundred Years' War with England, any 
compensation may come for the progressive (and 
as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records 
of a great past. If we consider alone the wide 



316 HEART OF EUROPE 

ruin in Flanders and Brabant, in Artois and 
Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible 
compensation for what we ourselves knew and 
now have lost for ever. Nevertheless, the law of 
the universe is death that life may come; and out 
of this present death that is so immeasurably 
more wide-spread and inclusive than any known 
before, even when the Huns or the Moslems 
were on their deadly march across Europe, there 
should come a proportionately fuller life, a "life 
more abundant," than that which is now in dis- 
solution. If this is so, if we can look across the 
plains of death and immeasurable destruction to 
the dimly seen peaks of the mountain frontiers of 
a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain 
and Liege, Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons 
and Reims pass in the crash and the dim smoke of 
obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, 
even as we can see poured out as a new oblation 
the ten millions of lives, the tears of an hundred 
millions of those who follow down into the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death. 

Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial 
question and the answer is left with us. This is 
no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of 
jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories; 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 317 

it is not the inevitable result of a malignant 
diplomacy from Frederick the Great and Metter- 
nich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not 
even the last act in a drama ushered in by Ma- 
chiavelli and brought to its denouement at Potts- 
dam. All these and myriad other strands have 
gone to the weaving of the poisoned shirt of 
Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of a 
dominant and supreme destiny by which are 
brought about the events that are only the way 
of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a 
culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the 
greatest mercy ever extended to men, for it may 
be made the means of a great purging, the atone- 
ment for the later sins of the world, the redemp- 
tion from a wilful blindness and folly that are 
not consonant with the will of God. 

There is a stern propriety in the centring around 
the Cathedral of Reims of the first phase of the 
great conflict, and in its slow and implacable 
demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet 
of the German people, though not himself a Ger- 
man, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as 
follows : 

Christianity — and this is its highest merit — has in some 
degree softened, but it could not destroy, the brutal German 



318 HEART OF EUROPE 

joy of battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, 
breaks in two, the savagery of the old fighters, the senseless 
Berserker fury of which the northern poets sing and say so 
much, will gush up anew. That talisman is decayed, and 
the day will come when it will piteously collapse. Then 
the old stone gods will rise from the silent ruins, and rub 
the dust of a thousand years from their eyes. Thor, with 
his giant's hammer, will at last spring up, and shatter to 
bits the Gothic cathedrals. 



Better than any other, he has declared the 
nature of this war that arose a century after his 
death. Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless 
and unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the 
Gothic cathedrals because he and they are an- 
titheses and they cannot exist in the same world. 
Like Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave 
under ground, century after century, while his 
beard grows through the rocky table before him, 
waiting for the call that will send him forth into 
the world again, primitive force and primitive 
craft have sullenly awaited the day when the 
Christian dispensation passes and they issue 
again into the light. In the fulness of time their 
day arrives and their first task is to destroy the 
symbol of their ended bondage. With the name 
of Christ on their lips and the boast of Christian 
civilisation in their mouths, the nations and the 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 319 

peoples forsake Christianity until only the nomen- 
clature remains and the memorials of its power 
and glory. 

Reims falls, but that which built Reims fell long 
ago, while the devious undermining and the blind 
sapping began even while the last cubits were 
being added to its stature, and since then has 
been only a steady progression in strength and 
assurance of its antitheses — of materialism, in- 
tellectualism, secularism, industrialism, opportu- 
nism, efficiency; founded on the coal and iron of 
the Scar of Europe and on the sinister and in- 
gratiating philosophy that came out of a re- 
entrant paganism, thrived under the fertilisation 
of an evolutionary empiricism, flowered in a 
Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. And al- 
ways it presented itself in a gracious guise; in- 
tellectual emancipation, humanitarianism, social 
service, democratic liberty, evolution, parliamen- 
tary government, progress, direct approach of 
each soul to God. It all sounded fine and high and 
noble, and on the 30th day of July, 1914, there 
could have been hardly a thousand men in the 
world, apart from those in the secret, who would 
not have said — there were not a thousand in 
Europe who did not believe — that man in his 



320 HEART OF EUROPE 

regular progress from lower ever to higher things 
had achieved a plane where the wars and savagery 
and lies of the past were no longer possible. 

And in one week from that fateful 30th of July 
the cloud castle had dissolved in a rain of blood. 
Could conviction have come to the world in any 
other way? Would the diseased body have re- 
acted to a gentle prophylactic, could the Surgeon 
have spared His knife? Since the knife is used, 
the answer admits of no dispute, but will it be 
enough? This is the question that is asked on 
every battle-field of a world at war; the lesson is 
set for the learning — will the nations learn? In 
so far as they have diverged from what Reims 
stood for; from Leo IX and Gregory VII and 
Innocent III; from Edward I and Ferdinand III 
and Louis IX; from Eleanor of Guienne and 
Blanche of Castile and Margaret of Malines; from 
St. Bernard, St. Norbert, and St. Anselm; from 
Albertus Magnus and Hugh of St. Victor and St. 
Thomas Aquinas, just so far have they to return, 
bringing with them not empty hands but all the 
great good winnowed from the harvest of grain 
and chaff they have reaped in those years of spir- 
itual and material and national disorder that be- 
gan when the dizzy fabric of medievalism trembled 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 321 

to its base at the exile at Avignon and "piteously 
collapsed" between the nailing at Wittenberg 
and the sansculotte throning of the "Goddess 
of Reason" in the desecrated cathedral of Notre 
Dame. There is good grain in plenty, but it is 
sowed along with the chaff and the tares, and 
now for the last harvesting the grain has germi- 
nated only to dwindle and die, for the tares have 
sprung up and choked it and the red garnering 
is of tares alone. 

Men would think, as they follow the scarlet 
annals of war, that the lesson was sufficiently 
clear even for pacificists to read as they run, but 
is it so? France reads and learns, gloriously re- 
generate, blotting out the memory of old folly 
with her blood of sacrifice, turning again as her 
first King Clovis was adjured by St. Remi of 
Reims, destroying what she worshipped a year 
ago, worshipping what then, and for two centuries 
before, she had destroyed. Again France shows 
the way, traversing it with bleeding feet and with 
many tears; Russia is learning it, though she had 
less to unlearn; Belgium must have learned it 
through her blind martyrdom; but how of the 
others? Is England learning, and Italy; will 
Germany learn, and Austria; will America learn, 



322 HEART OF EUROPE 

standing aloof from the smoking altar of sacri- 
fice; will the Church learn, there in trembling 
isolation while again Peter listens for the crow- 
ing of the cock? If not, if when silence comes 
down on a decimated, an exhausted, a bankrupt 
world, the old ways are sought again and men go 
on as before, then the myriad lives and the dreary 
rain of tears are indeed a vain oblation, and all 
will be to do over again. God sets no lesson that 
need not be learned, and unless out of it all comes 
an old heaven and a new earth, then the lesson 
is set again, as time after time it was set for im- 
perial Rome, until a century of war and pestilence 
and famine broke down her insolent pride and 
made from the ruins of her vainglory a founda- 
tion for a new civilisation in the strength of the 
Christianity she had denied. 

And if the lesson is learned by all tongues and 
all peoples, as we must believe will be, then the 
horror of human loss, the bitterness of Ypres and 
Louvain and Reims will receive its compensation, 
for out of death will come life and no man will 
have died in vain, no work of art will have per- 
ished without a return in kind. To lose Reims 
and regain after long years the impulse and the 
power to build after the same fashion would be 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 323 

more than ample compensation. We have tried 
for many centuries and have failed; no man has 
built anything approaching it for seven hundred 
years, nor has any one matched the statue of 
Our Lady at Paris, or the "Worship of the Lamb" 
at Ghent, or the glass of Chartres, or the tapes- 
tries of Arras, or the metal work of Dinant and 
Tournai. There was something lacking, some once 
indwelling spirit had been taken away, and though 
we tried to reassure ourselves by our boasting in 
far-away lines of accomplishment — parliamentary 
government, manhood suffrage, clever mechanical 
devices, deductive science, mastery of earth forces 
hitherto unknown, industrialism, high finance, 
favourable balance of trade, evolutionary philoso- 
phy, public-school systems, vocational training, or 
what-not; though we even made the effort to exalt 
the Pantheon and Fifth Avenue to rivalry with 
Amiens, the Sieges Allee into an emulation of the 
statues of Reims, the Salon and Luxembourg and 
Royal Academy above the primitives of Flanders — 
it was all unconvincing to ourselves and in the 
end we came to say that, after all, it did not matter 
anyway, art was, "in the ultimate analysis," only 
a dispensable amenity of life, which could go on 
very well without it. Then came the revelation 



324 HEART OF EUROPE 

of 1914 and we saw our foolishness, realising at 
last that, "amenity" or no, art did indicate the 
existence in a society of something without which 
it was bound to decay to the point of extinction; 
and as the monuments we had despised because 
they exceeded our own powers of achievement 
were one by one taken from us, we saw architec- 
ture and painting and sculpture and all the other 
arts in a new light and offered our reverence, too 
late, to what we had lost for ever. 

Whatever the issue of the war, the world can 
never be the same, but a very different place; and 
amongst the differences will be a new realisation 
of the nature and function of art. All the follies 
of the last fifty years — didacticism, Bavarian il- 
lustration, realism, "new art," impressionism, 
"cubism," boulevardesque and neo-Gothic and 
revived Roman architecture — all the petty and 
insincere and premeditated fashions must go, and 
in their place come a new sincerity, a new sense 
of self -consecration. 

The real things of life are coming into view 
through the revealing fires of the battle-field, and 
the new experiences of men confronted at last 
by everlasting truths. With the destruction of 
each work of old art comes a new duty that de- 



EX TENEBRIS LUX 325 

mands all that is best and strongest and most sin- 
cere in every man — the duty of making good the 
loss, in kind; the duty of building a new civilisa- 
tion and a new culture on the old foundations 
now revealed through the burning away of the 
useless cumbrances of futile superstructures; the 
duty of making a Cathedral of Reims possible 
again, not through self-conscious and competent 
premeditation but because at last men have come 
to their senses, regained their old standard of 
comparative values, and so can no more fail to 
build in the spirit of Reims and in reverence for 
the eternal truths it enshrined and set forth than 
could those who built it seven centuries ago in 
the sweat of their brows, the joy of their hearts, 
and the high devotion of their souls. 



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